


Challenge and Answer

by roseapprentice



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: 30 Day OTP Porn Challenge, A lot of these fills are actually much fluffier than I remembered, Angst, Bloodplay, Bondage, Bottom Tony Stark, Double Penetration, Ficlet Collection, Fluff, M/M, Multi, Orgasm Delay, PWP, Pepper shows up for the occasional fill, Plant AU, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Porn, Power Dynamics, See chapter notes for warnings, Threesome, just for one of the fills tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-13 02:22:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 42,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3364208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseapprentice/pseuds/roseapprentice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My fills for the 30 Day OTP Porn Challenge. Expect lots of poetic, angsty, fluffy sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Anal Sex

**Author's Note:**

> I'm brushing up my fills for the challenge and posting them here. Those who follow my tumblr closely have seen these already, as the [full challenge](http://roseapprentice.tumblr.com/tagged/30-day-otp-porn-challenge) is up and available to read there in first draft form. It took me about a year to finish this challenge, so some of this stuff is a bit old...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** PTSD, depression, and a general tone of unease.

Stillness.

The quiet and the lack of motion were the first things Tony noticed when he woke. It was a sharp contrast from his dreams, to suddenly be freely breathing air that smelled like bedsheets and nothing, while the scents of dust and humanity and propane abruptly vanished to a ghostly memory. He was in bed next to Loki. Stark Tower. Safe and home and nothing to worry about, nothing to suffocate or splinter or burn.

This wasn't Afghanistan.

In his dreams he had felt at once the brutal heat and cutting cold of the desert, day and night juxtaposed. Here, there was a soft warmth, a lean familiar body pressed against his side, so gentle it didn’t quite feel real, didn’t feel solid.

In moments like this Tony felt a muffled, illusive sort of terror, that nothing would ever be as visceral and real to him as his nightmares were.

There was a listlessness, a buffer between him and the waking world. A calm, and maybe nothing could break that calm but imminent threat and twisting darkness, nothing but more nightmare fodder. Maybe his psyche was too jostled and he would walk the rest of his life in this bland, even haze.

Tony remembered, glimmeringly, that that made no sense. That just last night, shattered green eyes had cut through him, that the words  _oh god_ and  _perfect_  had crossed his mind and he’d known Loki to the core, to the exclusion of all other knowledge.

But In this moment he could only half remember that, couldn’t quite believe it. He’d made it up, definitely. He didn’t have the capacity to feel good things that deeply. After everything, he wasn’t wired that way, and the rest was wishful thinking. He couldn’t summon those sensations, couldn’t recall friction or heat or any of the more thrilling kinds of fear. The memory of yesterday, of the man lying next to him, of intimacy, those were the muted thing, slipping through his fingers and fading next to the more recent horror. Those were what most people would call  _dream-like_.

Lying still under the blankets, what Tony felt now was fear, but it was a frozen, lace-fine fear, soft and fragile and impossible to quantify or fight. The unfounded but inescapable suspicion that all the pleasant things in his life were made up, imagined or exaggerated or lost beyond retrieval.

There was soft warmth and soft cold, like static snow, piled high around him, encasing him and frustrating any impulse to reach out, to shake Loki awake. Afraid to ask that what existed between them be real and solid after all, because if the answer was no?

Tony waited for fear to pass a little. Not gone, but dulled just a little with the rhythm of a natural pulse, and at the low point he took a breath that hurt and threw out one quiet word. “Loki.”

Loki was light sleeper, and Tony heard the god’s breathing change, then felt the body next to him shift, rolling to face him. Those green eyes met his and Tony felt just the faintest spark of a circuit completing, and yes this was better. Just the discomfort of looking into another living pair of eyes did a little to dispel the fog. Loki raised an eyebrow, disgruntled at being woken from a sound sleep, but his tone was patient enough when he queried, “Nightmares?”

Tony opened his mouth and closed it again, not sure how to explain. It hadn’t been the nightmare that bothered him, not really. If he’d understood the problem, if it made any sense, he could have solved it on his own without calling out for help. “Being awake,” he finally corrected. “Being awake alone.” Not it, not quite a real explanation, but it was close enough to the truth, and Loki knew that dance even better than he did. Loki saw and acknowledged the almost-truth with a nod, took hold of Tony’s head in his two hands, grip just painful enough to ground him, holding Tony still and looking determinedly into his eyes.

Eye contact with Loki was one of Tony’s favorite and least favorite things. It was water in the desert and nails on a chalkboard and a chair about to overbalance under him. He drank it in and waited anxiously for it to end, and squirmed uncomfortably when it didn’t.

There was nothing foggy or dream-like about this. This was blade-crisp and too close and just right. Tony finally squeezed his eyes closed against it. “Okay. I’m okay now. Yeah.”

“And still you retreat from me,” Loki observed, displeased.

“Shit. Look, I can’t…” He opened his eyes again, silently begging Loki to let him have this, to let him be as numb as he needed to be. “I don’t s’pose I could convince you to go back to sleep?”

“No.”

Loki’s hands still held Tony’s head in place, one thumb digging painfully into his earlobe. Tony reached up and Loki let him take that hand instead, threading their fingers together in a simple and elegant alternating weave.

“Tell me why you’re shutting me out.”

Tony closed his eyes again and pressed his face lightly against the pillow, pretending to himself that he was talking to no one, and using that to be a touch more honest than he quite knew how to be. “I hate this. One minute I’m scared I can’t feel anything, and the next minute I’m even more scared that I can.”

In thoughtful tones Loki said, “I see.”

Tony didn’t open his eyes. He felt Loki shift toward him, felt warm lips brush against his neck and soft hair feathering against his chin as the other man leaned in close.

“Tony,” Loki murmured against his ear, and there was something of the cutting cold from his dreams in the god’s voice, a whisper of frost that made the inventor suppress a shudder. “Tony, let me make all your wildest fears come true.”

Adrenaline and arousal lanced through Tony’s body at the words. Feeling found out and trapped and suddenly wanting nothing else, he spoke before he could stop himself. “ _Yes. Fuck_  yes. Do that.”

Loki took firm hold of Tony’s shoulder and rolled him flat onto his back, no clothes in the way, they’d taken care of that last night, and those eyes were fixed on his again, making a sort of anxious dread twist in the pit of Tony’s stomach, so confusing when there was also a hand sliding down to wrap around his half-hard cock and stroking, sending sparks of hot pleasure up to mix with all that sick terror.

Once Tony was fully hard, the slide of Loki’s hand brushing sweeter and sharper against him as he stiffened, then Loki’s hands and eyes were suddenly missing from Tony’s awareness as the god knelt up to reach for the bottle and

_— please don’t leave me alone but don’t come back either I can’t take this I can’t take you —_

“Would you get back down here already?” Tony urged aloud.

A light snap of a lid, a hiss of air replacing liquid, another snap, and Loki was back, wet fingers sliding up the inside of Tony’s thigh and back and down and _in_. They probed and prodded with all the precision of mastery, and meanwhile Loki leaned down to kiss Tony’s mouth, and it turned out Loki could kiss Tony the way he looked at Tony, like water in the desert, like everything about to fall apart. Like nails on a chalkboard, cutting to the core and _grating_  just so.

Tony whimpered and kissed back, trying fight, or give in, or gain some coherence, but there was no rhythm to find, only need and chaos. Loki could wield softness like a weapon, could make even dull and gentle things into knife-edge need and brutal threat, and he did it by never letting Tony forget how much he could be feeling if Loki would only let him. Every so often his finger would find that perfect spot, drag a finger into it with almost abusive force, and Tony would struggle for breath, the intensity of it suffocating him, splintering and burning.

And then that finger would move to the side again, touching but not touching enough, forcing Tony to imagine what the motions would feel like if only Loki would move over just that  _little bit_.

“What are you afraid of?” Loki breathed into the kiss, and pulled back to watch Tony struggle for words.

“Goddamnit,” Tony swore, trying for aggravation but unable to keep the whine out of his voice. “I’m afraid you won’t move your finger over  _right fucking now_.”

A smile.

_— so not fair that he could be smiling when Tony was so desperate —_

“Such an easy fear to grant,” Loki said, and kept stroking just off the mark.

“ _Goddamnit_ ,” Tony repeated, trying to twist into the touch and making no headway.

And then finally, finally, Loki withdrew his fingers and gripped Tony’s hips, pulling up to get the angle he wanted and then pushing in and filling him.

Then everything switched gears as Loki took up a pace that was fast and hard and precise, and it was like an avalanche gaining force.

_— too much too soon too close too yes too good —_

“Perhaps next time you’ll remember…” Loki paused for a few harder thrusts that made gravity twist in odd directions and in response Tony heard broken shouts that were probably his. “…that being  _found_  is more fearful and inescapable a fate than being  _lost_ , hm?” Loki finished.

Tony tried to reply, maybe say something like  _do that again_  or  _yes_  or  _Loki_ but only succeeded in making a sound something like, “Agnn,” and then whimpering as he gave up any aspirations to coherence.

Then the avalanche hit, force and falling and whitewash as Tony came hard as Loki rode him through it.

Loki came soon after, the sudden pleasure  _— fear —_  in his eyes was perfect, something Tony needed, and the friction of his motions grated on Tony’s raw nerves, like a piercing noise, like something too close.

Like being found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *hides in embarrassed horror while you all read stuff I wrote like a year ago*


	2. Awkward Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really went all out on the “awkward” here. Kind of unfortunate.

In retrospect, Tony couldn’t really blame DUM E.

Except that he _could_ blame him, and _did_ blame him, and was seriously considering letting Happy move the damn robot to the office for janitorial work.

But to be fair, DUM E had been told to douse him again _if and only if_ he was on fire, and the words, “I’m on fire,” had, in fact, crossed Tony’s lips while he fucking Loki against the work table.

Most of the CO2 actually ended up on Loki, which seemed fortuitous until Tony learned the hard way how certain species of alien reacted to extreme cold. The _blue_ thing was definitely a surprise.

And if he’d thought a cold shower could be a bit of a jolt when he had a hard-on, it was clearly because he’d never before been on the verge of fucking a devastatingly sexy god of chaos straight to orgasm, only to suddenly find his cock _completely encased in ice-cold asshole_.

That was brisk.

And yes, Tony did have a bit of secret temperature kink, but this was a bit much, and there was only so much heat loss blood vessels could take before they started contracting with painful insistence, and just… ow.

Ow, his cock.

Ow, his pride, which was undergoing similar shrinkage.

And ow, the look Loki gave him as he realized what had happened and abruptly vanished.

Just ow.

 


	3. Body Fluids

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Bloodplay, cutting.

Tony was in his workshop. The music was loud, and his heart likely pumped in time to it as he worked. Schematics today. Rearranging the light over his worktable as he brainstormed his next suit of armor.

Loki was watching, examining the absent light in Tony’s eyes as they flitted across the displays. The inventor’s expression looked almost passionless for its focus, if you didn’t know better. Tony’s blood flowed in each motion of his hands, each flick of his eyelids. Every smallest muscle contraction wrung it out and onward, so that even when Tony went still, arms at his sides as he paused in pure, unadorned thought, he was still in motion, still flowing, still using up that painfully scarce force of life and vitality.

Tony’s blood fascinated and terrified Loki. It was so limited, so scarce, the heat of Tony’s life that could only flow so far, only burn so much before there was nothing left to fuel the fires of enthusiasm and wit that cracked and melted in the deepest forges of that creative mind.

But Loki loved seeing that blood flow freely, soaking careless out through broken skin, watching  Tony spend his blood as if there were an eternity of it to spare.

It was thrilling. Tony, smeared with sweat and every shade of rust after a battle or a hazardous build. Tony, flushed under Loki’s touch. Tony, grunting in some combination of pleasure and helplessness when Loki bit at his skin hard enough to leave tiny, deep red globes welling up throughout the imprint of his teeth.

Loki wanted. Wanted to preserve and spill, secure and wreck, save and take and waste. He wanted mortality hot on his tongue. But just now he refrained, waited, yielded to the need for Tony to make these particular upgrades. The suit needed to be refined to its purpose. To preserve, secure, and save.

But the moment Tony closed the file and before he opened another, Loki was on him, kissing his neck and sliding strong hands down his side and coaxing him with sweet and dangerous words about slick and lifeblood and shine of sharp metal and the color red. Loki was good with his words and knew his way well around this man’s head, and it wasn’t long before Tony was shirtless under him on that very table, placing a knife in his hand and looking up expectantly.

It was a blade designed for cutting through the strong cloth material he’d experimented with two builds ago, razor sharp to accommodate the give of a flexible fabric. Loki started by placing the point of the blade in the hollow at the base of the man’s throat, and stilled when the flesh there moved with the tug of Tony’s swallow, shifting just a hair into the point of the knife and breaking his own skin on it by accident and apprehension.

Loki smiled and continued down in a straight line. The blade was sharp, sharp enough that skin parted like water under it. It was only a few inches before the knife edge hit metal with a weak clink, the path cut short by the casing around Tony’s reactor.

Tony’s chest was heaving now, rising and falling in sharp breaths as the inventor looked up at him. Loki could feel the man’s erection pressing more and more pointedly up against his thigh.

Loki lifted the knife away and carefully placed it on the table, well to the side of the man under him. Returning his attention to Tony, he leaned down and licked up the line of red, shifting his thigh to grind against Tony’s cock through his pants, ensuring that pleasurable friction mixed confusingly with the sting of saliva on an open cut. Tony was swearing and arching into both points of contact with equal fervor.

Loki let up, and without losing contact with Tony’s skin he let his blood-damp lips skim softly over the surface of Tony’s chest. He braced one elbow beside Tony’s head and reached down with the other hand to open Tony’s trousers, found his cock and stroked firmly.

“Fffffuckfuckfuckthat’s-good-geez-Loki-fuck…”

Loki’s mouth repeatedly circled Tony’s nipple, smearing the liquid as it grew thicker and brighter crimson with exposure to the open air.

Tony’s hands were on him, running up the lines of his body and settling into grip tightly in his hair, pulling Loki down to press his mouth harder where Tony was missing it. Loki obliged, licking firmly over his nipple, and Tony exhaled sharply, relieved and startled and pleased. It only took a few more passes of Loki’s hand to send the man over the edge, and Tony came, shaking, with a series of cries so low and rough they were almost growls.

Then the inventor went still, bringing a hand to trail his fingers over his damp chest as he caught his breath. “See what you mean,” he mumbled somewhat brokenly. “Red. Good color.”

Loki kissed the open cut once more, and tasted life and metal and mortality. “Would that you had more to spare.”

 


	4. Bondage

Tony spent all day engineering a flexible cable that Loki couldn’t break, and when he was finally satisfied with his work,  the result was a pencil-thin black cord of a texture and give almost reminiscent of soft leather.

Loki ran it through his fingers appreciatively as he sat on the bed. “It’s extraordinary.”

“It would have to be.” Tony stood opposite, watching the line of black slide through Loki’s fingers and pool onto the floor. The cord was a very unnatural thing, a twisting of elements that pulled at light a little too hard and looked almost liquid when gathered together for how one length of it blurred into another. He watched the way those pale fingers played in the rope, caressing and wrapping themselves up in it, tugging again to double-check its strength until tendons stood out in his wrists and Tony could see the muscles bunching in Loki’s shoulders to gain leverage. “So.” Tony cleared his throat. “Tonight. Safeword?”

“‘ _No_ ’ will do just fine tonight,” Loki declined almost absently, attention still focused on the material Tony had engineered. Then he shot Tony a wicked grin. “How much refusal could I really speak against the craftsman who builds me such a fine gift, after all?”

Tony’s gaze caught on that smile and stuck. He cleared his throat again, but the sound came out a little more strangled and helplessly aroused than last time. “Ready then?”

Still smiling, Loki dropped the cord, scooched back and to the side until he was sitting at the top of the bed, back to the tall latticework of the metal headboard. It was solid, and had thus been much easier to design than the rope, once Loki had let Tony get a close look at the alloys that made up his armor.

The god very pointedly lifts his forearms to rest against the headboard as well, framing his own head. Each of his wrists was nestled against a juncture of metal, a point where they could be tied securely in place.

Tony sank one knee into the bed and leaned down to pick up the cord where Loki had dropped it. “It’ll be easier if you take off your clothes _first_.”

“Who says I like easy?”

“You like _me_.”

“ _You_ are the most exquisitely _difficult_ breathing creature I have ever met,” Loki complimented, tone surprisingly serious as he complied and started unbuttoning his shirt.

Tony crawled over to him and leaned in, came up just short of kissing Loki, and bit his own lip impishly instead, teasing just a bit, a shadow of the coming moment when Loki would be unable to reach out and touch. He reached down and made quick work of stripping off Loki’s jeans and boxers both. The god shifted his weight to accommodate the task, then reached up to pull his shirt off by the sleeves and tossed it aside, completely naked by the time he brought his arms to once again rest on either side of his head. It was so much a pose of surrender that Tony saw in his mind's eye an old memory of Loki actually surrendering to him in battle, and looking much like this.

But this time, yeah, _naked_.

“Better?” Loki queried.

“Much.” Tony was still dressed, fully clothed with Loki naked in front of him, and this was already a bit of a power kick. Kneeling up on his knees, Tony made his way to Loki’s left and tied his wrist securely in place. The rope was designed to bite hard on itself, while being a bit gentler on human or Aesir skin, and the knot held when he finished and Loki experimentally tried to twist free. Tony could see Loki growing hard just trying and failing to escape, the black material holding his wrist perfectly still as Tony’s grip alone never could.

Tony grinned and placed a hand on Loki’s wrist, sliding it lightly up his arm while the god couldn’t back away, using this little bit of power to full advantage and watching Loki’s pupils dilate at the touch, watching him shiver when Tony’s fingers traced the sensitive medial side of his upper arm.

Loki did use his free arm then to pull Tony in for a kiss, a heady thing, soft and sliding and  deep, and Tony was clinging to the latticework headboard for stability by the time they parted, both breathing a little harder.

Loki let go of his head and picked up the remaining length of rope just as Tony realized he’d dropped it. The loops that spilled down from Loki’s hand swung sharply with the unsteadiness of his arm as he moved a third time to rest his wrist against a crux of metal beams. “Do hurry.”

“Right.” Tony kept his grip on the headboard as he lifted his knee to shift over Loki’s bare thighs and get to his right side. He tied Loki’s other hand and sat back to look.

Loki’s skin nearly glowed against the storm-grey sheets and dark metal and the hanging ends of the rope that played along his forearms. All whipcord muscle and restrained power, and Loki offered him that same smirk from earlier that made Tony’s throat do a thing. “Completely helpless,” the god offered.

“Not with that mouth you’re not,” Tony said roughly and kissed him again. He let his hands slide down Loki’s sides, over ribs and down to the ridge of his pelvis. It wasn’t a power struggle just now, and that was such a rare thing between them. Tony took and Loki gave, yielding and shifting to accommodate his every touch, letting him direct each sinuous motion. Tony moved down to mouth at Loki’s neck, mindful of the need not to silence a trickster for too long when he had one well and truly trapped.

He pushed and pulled and stroked until the need for more skin against his own and — _fuck_ — the need to get out of his now-way-too-tight jeans both joined forces and finally convinced Tony to pull away and shucked his own clothing. Loki watched hungrily, unable to help or hinder in the process.

But Tony was back soon enough, kneeling down now, shoving his knees under Loki’s thighs until their cocks were flush together and they both groaned. Tony stroked them both together and felt Loki jerking into the touch. Soon everything was gone but friction and the sound of his name on Loki’s lips and the sound of Loki’s name on his, both reverent and pleading. Tony’s head fell forward onto a convenient shoulder.

“Look at me.”

He heard the words only distantly, far away where he was lost in the intoxicating slide of Loki’s body against his. Then he felt that body shift for leverage, resisting him and pulling against its binding for the first time since those initial experimental tugs. “Damnit Tony, _look at me_ ,” Loki hissed pointedly, and Tony lifted his head.

Either Loki’s timing was pristine or it was the look in his eyes that did it, but Tony lost it then and came, hot against Loki’s stomach and his own hand. The whole of Tony’s mind unraveled in that moment, taken over by the darkness in Loki’s eyes, something not quite menace but more shadow and need and completely helpless. And when Tony came down a little, Loki’s voice washing through him like heat and perfection finally partitioned itself back into words again, and they were, “Tony, move your hand, I need just a bit more, _damn_ you, please, Tony, _please_ , _Tony_ …”

Tony started moving his hand again, just on Loki now, and the god came soon enough, tendons standing out in his wrists again as his body spasmed with it.

And then it was all desperate breaths and sated heartbeats coming to a slow. Tony reached up tiredly to pull the knots loose, and Loki brought his arms to wrap around Tony’s shoulders. “Extraordinary.”

 


	5. Nipple Play

Loki squirmed under Tony’s touch, throwing his head back just as he knew the inventor liked, so his hair feathered out across the bed. Normally the sheets were black, but today Tony had traded those out for a pale cream color just a shade darker than Loki’s skin. Today the trickster was exposed in a world of white, and every crease of the covers under his fisting hands cast stark shadows, clear for Tony to see.

And Tony was measuring his reactions carefully, too carefully really, and what right had this mortal to play and analyze his body like it was one his damned machines? What — gods — what —

Tony was tracing one fingernail up and down over the nub of his nipple, too light to scratch, and Loki hadn’t known he liked that. Had never been experimented on this thoroughly, this intuitively.

Tony had no right, but Tony certainly had a talent for all things he had no right to. It was one of many things Loki loved about Tony, and Loki often found himself tempted to reward the mortal with a number of things he truly truly had no right to: thrones and gold-skinned apples and stolen centuries and — oh hells — Tony could have the keys to Ragnorok if he kept doing that with his tongue.


	6. Corsets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that took so long! I didn’t want to post the previous drabble by itself, and this ficlet took by far the most rewriting between tumblr and AO3. The original fill for this day had ideas that I really didn’t execute the way I wanted to. The remaining days should go more quickly.

Loki was wearing _those_ pants again.

 _Those damned pants_.

They were made of a fine black fabric that Loki often wore, probably because of how it suited and emphasized his slim frame. But that didn’t even begin to explain the problem.

They were form-fitted to the musculature of Loki’s ass and thighs — whipcord here, pleasantly round there. It all made it a herculean task for Tony to focus his eyes anywhere else.

Just wait. It got worse.

The real problem was the laces.

When Loki wore _those_ pants, he always wore them laced at the sides. Thin strips of black leather that wove their way up through lines of loops all along the outer side of Loki’s knees and thighs and hips, and disappeared up under his shirt —

\-- except just sometimes when they _didn’t_ , when the waist of those pants didn’t quite meet his shirt, and instead offered a tantalizing hint of skin.

Tony wasn’t sure exactly when Loki had stopped exclusively wearing armor on his threatening-people escapades and starting dressing like an incidentally hot Asgardian prince on his day off, but he was pretty sure it had been either shortly before or shortly after Tony started sleeping with him.

Digression. Where was he? Right. Those damned pants.

The laces were what allowed the trousers to hug Loki’s form so perfectly, pulling the fabric together all along his outer thighs, so the cloth bunched unevenly under the crisscross of laces, and was pulled tight to his skin to form smooth lines across every other surface of Loki’s upper legs.

There was really no limit to the patterns by which the laces could be looped and tied, at least not for a man who know his way around knots and strings, who had a flair for the elegant and the sadistically creative. Loki wore them tied a different way every time. And he wore them just to torment Tony.

Because the bastard _knew_ Tony’s fingers itched to unlace them. To puzzle out the knots, to tug at the strings until they came free and the weave loosened, allowing Loki’s hips that little extra freedom of movement. The knotted end popping through the little metal loops one by one, following the seam of the fabric as Tony worked his way down in a series of abrupt little tugs of leather through silver. And sometimes Loki would straddle him while Tony worked at those pants, and roll his hips just a little harder against Tony’s each time he pulled one length of leather all the way clear of a loop, so the task grew trickier and trickier as Tony slowly lost his composure to friction and pressure and mystery.

In summary, those damned pants.

Loki was wearing them to a SHIELD meeting today. Seriously, had the god no sense of decency?

Well, no, Tony’s brain answered him immediately, and chose that moment to very inconveniently start reviewing past studies to prove its thesis. His jeans were getting tight in the middle of a meeting already, and all Loki had done was show up wearing those damned pants.

Oh, right, and Loki hadn’t actually been invited to this meeting, so there were a lot of guns pointed at him now.

Tony should probably have been worrying about that, but _those damned pants_. All sorts of weaving went up the sides today, celtic in the symmetry and complexity of the knots. They were tied off neatly at the top, and the laces hung with plenty of spare length, ends decorated with shards of golden metal that swayed and glinted with the god’s every elegant motion, and -- 

— wait, were those scraps Loki had shattered off from Tony’s armor the last time they fought? The trickster was using them as jewelry for the ends of his pant laces. That shouldn’t be so hot. That really, really shouldn’t be so hot and —

Guns. Danger. Focus.

Tony cleared his throat and held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “Alright, settle down everyone.”

Loki grinned right at Tony, all glee and darkness. “ _You_ settle down.”

Grateful that the table kept his crotch out of easy view, Tony scooted in a little farther and kept talking to the armed agents at the table — Natasha being the most concerning one. “He’s probably an illusion anyway. I bet you look ridiculous to him, pointing all that ammo at nothing. Lets just hear what the man has to say.”

The agents lowered their weapons and started scanning the room warily for any sign of the “real” Loki.

Relaxing once the projectiles went down, Tony looked Loki in the eyes and endeavored to seem bored and slightly antagonistic. “So. What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to bring chaos and ruin. As usual.”

“Another one of your evil plans? And here I was hoping you’d be nice.”

“I can’t do both?”

Seriously, if anyone ever found out about this affair, it was going to be so obvious in retrospect with all the double entendres. And also, _those damned pants_.

Tony continued, “Anything you’d care to inform us about, or is this just a social call?”

“A social call,” Loki answered with a definitive nod of his head. “With just a side of kidnap.”

Tony’s eyes widened. Oh fuck.

In the really, really good sense.

The guns went up again, but not in time. Then there was nothing, that moment of deadly cold and reeling vertigo that Tony would be getting used to by now if it was possible to get used to Loki’s teleports.

If it was possible to get used to anything about Loki.

He rematerialized in the bed of an unfamiliar bedroom, sparsely furnished and earth-toned and clean, with no apparent exits. Tony’s jeans were gone, much to his relief, but his boxers and shirt were still in place, and Loki was still fully dressed, straddling him in the position Tony had just been so fondly remembering.

“Hello,” Tony breathlessly greeted the suddenly-much-closer trickster god.

“Hello Tony,” Loki greeted, leaning down to tease him with the proximity and posturing of not-quite-kisses. “Welcome to captivity.”

“Still wondering if this is an actual evil plan or if you were just impatient to get me out of that meeting.”

“There’s an overarching plan in the works, and I require that you be off the grid for the next three days.” Loki ground his hips down in exactly the way Tony had just been imagining, a minimal little undulation, limited by the fit of those... “But yes, I was impatient.”

Tony’s voice broke some on his reply, but he did manage to speak. “Doesn’t that mean I should probably be resisting your wiles and trying to escape? If you’re gonna be. Um. Overarching?”

“Notions of ‘ _should_ ’ are always so tricky, don’t you think?” Loki mused. He skimmed his nose up Tony’s jaw, earning a very light shiver that was barely a breath. “That question, _what should I do_ , is often just a more clouded rephrasing of, _what do I want_?”

Tony certainly couldn’t deny that his mind was feeling very clouded right now. He was halfway swallowed up by a haze of arousal and an edge of intrigued lust, and looking up into Loki’s eyes, he really just wanted to be swallowed up the rest of the way.

“Of course if you’re really unsure on that point...” Loki gestured elaborately toward a far wall, and Tony turned his head to see a door materializing near the corner.

Tony felt the warm press of Loki’s thighs shift away, making room for Tony to get up if he wished, and it was a profoundly disappointing sensation. He tossed Loki a long look that grew more and more _wounded puppydog_ as time passed, until the god seemed to catch on to the fact that he had no serious interest in leaving.

Loki smiled, vanished the door with another gesture, and settled slowly into Tony’s lap again, sliding clever hands under his shirt and languidly up his abdomen as he leaned down to speak in Tony’s ear. “I don’t want to force you, Tony. Just the opposite. I want you _eager_.” This last word was nearly a snarl, and then Loki seemed to catch himself, moved his head back to cock an eyebrow and continue in a casual tone, “I want you frustrated. I want to put barriers in your path, and see that beautiful mind of yours thinking like mad, and desperate like mad. The door leading _in_ is the one closed to you and you’re only just clever enough for the lock. I’d very much like that to drive you insane.”

Tony’s hips twisted helplessly up as Loki spoke. His body seemed to be under the impression that it could bury itself in those words, like words were close and solid things, like Loki was close and solid but _not close enough_. Tony moved his arms up to accommodate Loki in working his shirt over his shoulders and head, and then lowered his hands to Loki’s hips, simultaneously undoing the top two knots with familiar ease.

He tugged in a series of well practiced motions, and frowned when the lace ends didn’t come free of the first four loops. “Metal’s in the way,” he observed. “Scaled too big. I can’t completely unlace them.”

Loki tilted his head. “True, but it would appear you need only _loosen_ them them to pull them free, yes?”

Yes but that was so much harder; the leather was elaborately knotted all the way down and if he had to pull the string through the knots length by length and then re-tighten them to get slack for the next length of thread…

Shit. That was exactly what Loki had in mind. “You’re really, really evil, you know that?”

“Would your rather go home?” Loki asked lightly, and rolled his hips again.

“Ah. Ghn,” Tony heard himself whimper, then lowered his voice and said, “Fuck no.”

So Tony set himself to the task while Loki set himself to the game of distraction, trailing his fingers up and down Tony’s torso, mouth doing devilish things to the lines of his neck, and occasionally stopping to engage Tony in a long, all-consuming kiss that would break Tony apart and shatter his concentration and Loki would stop just as the inventor’s hands went still, moving back to his neck and chest and leaving Tony all the more rushed in his efforts.

Tony’s fingers, well trained for this sort of task but not quite well trained enough, made slow, steady work of loosening and tightening the laces and adding more and more give to the fit of the pants. He could feel Loki growing hard with every roll of their hips, and it couldn’t possibly be much longer now. Tony’s fingers caught on a lace in an unexpected place, and paused to tilt his head to the side and look as he felt around.

There were two taut sections of string traveling up Loki’s sides under the fabric and disappearing to somewhere under the green hem of Loki’s shirt. The knot of string wasn’t limited to Loki’s pants, Tony realized with dread. It was tied to something else, something holding them up. “What’s this?” he asked warily.

Loki’s eyes glinted with an absolutely evil shine. He pulled off his shirt, crossing his arms to pull the hem over his head with feminine grace.

“Aw, _fuck_ ,” Tony breathed, torn between hoarse reverence and total aggravation.

The corset hugged close to the lines of Loki’s body, dark green material cut and layered decoratively to accent and exaggerate his slimness, and sewn in thick gold stitching that glinted and matched the metal fragments that still decorated the four ends of the laces, impossible as ever to pull through the loops.

Now, as it turned out, those same laces wove up into the corset, from the sides to the back. Tony couldn’t see much of the weaving, but when he traced his fingers up Loki’s back, he groaned in pleading complaint as he felt a network of knots just as complex and puzzling as those he’d been working with all along, but on a larger scale.

All in all, those pants weren’t coming off until he untied this whole thing from the top. “Shit, you said I just needed to _loosen_ them!”

Loki grinned wide and smug as anything. “I said _it would appear so_. I never claimed that the appearance carried merit.”

Tony took a moment to squeeze his eyes shut and swear creatively as he tried to regain the mental faculties for the task at hand. It didn’t help at all that being tricked like this made him really really want to roll them over until he was on top, hold Loki down and fuck the sneaky right out of him, but _those damned pants_ were still in the way. And if he wanted to get them off, well, then he was right back to square one.

Loki worked his thighs upward and then used them as leverage so he was closer to straddling a point low on the inventor’s torso, and Tony’s hips arched up with the motion, weight shifting to his heels, desperately working to prolong the sensation of their bodies shifting together.

Loki rolled back down, and now Tony was all caught up in something very like a chinese finger trap, where the more his body rutted up desperately for more, the farther he got from regaining the clarity to solve the puzzle and actually fuck the man moving so deliciously against him. A long stretch of time passed like that, and whenever Tony managed to still the motion of his own hips, Loki would shift or lick or bite and set him off again, and Tony was just stuck, battling his desperation and losing again and again in an intoxicating rhythm of hot breath and need and ecstasy.

Only when he thought he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from coming did Loki finally relent, letting Tony force himself to still and just watching as the mortal gasped and swore, fought his thoughts back to ideas as complex as the existence of strings and laces.

Finally, Tony rested a hand against his face and spoke unsteadily. “Move over and lie down so I can get to the knotwork on your back. I can’t do this unless you’re on your front.”

Loki complied, lowering himself gracefully to settle face-down next to him on the bed, and Tony’s gaze caught on his bare shoulders, the shifting dips and shadows of his shoulderblades rolling through the motion, half covered by the top edge of the corset.

Tony straddled his ass and settled in to finally solve this. He traced along the knots, following the line of each of the four strings, looking for ends or slack or any sort of starting place crack to mystery.

Loki squirmed around under him, grinding his ass -- still covered in black cloth -- up against Tony’s crotch through his boxers, and Tony took a fortifying breath, then another. Trying to bring his mind to bear on the input from his hands and eyes instead of the melting heat pooling lower down in his body.

There was a puzzle here to be solved.

He traced out the threads, catalogued his findings. Every so often Loki would move his hips again _just so_ and he lost his place, went back, traced and thought and bent the problem every way inside his mind, trying to force and answer. With that kind of distraction, it took Tony a long time to be sure of his conclusion, but eventually he was.

There were no ends to find, no slack, no way to solve this. There were only two long laces, elaborately intertwined, looping back on themselves without fail.

Tony fell forward and rested his head against the trickster’s back, so desperate and strung out he wanted to cry, heart pounding with anger and arousal for the man who was so thoroughly mindfucking him. “It’s impossible.”

Loki spoke in a low voice, rough with his own growing desperation, but still unwilling to cease taunting him. “Now Tony, would I really give you a riddle that had no solution?”

“Yes.”

Loki ground up into him approvingly again, and Tony gasped unwillingly. Oh, that felt unfairly good. “Yes,” Loki agreed. “But not today. Try again.”

“Try again,” the mortal echoed flatly, or would have, were his voice not shaking and broken.

“Mmm. Use your powers of observation.”

“Observation,” Tony repeated horsely. “You’re kidding me. What do you think I’ve… been… Oh.”

Tony took hold of the scraps of metal at the ends of each string, pulled sharply to get enough string free to maneuver them, and with a swift application of leverage and slicing motion, cut the sections of string attaching the corset to Loki’s trousers.

Solution found.

“You. _Sneaky_...” Tony couldn’t find a sufficient insult. He was too desperate and too angry (and too impressed) and, in all honesty, long since out of words.

“ _I_ thought the pendants were conspicuous enough mys — ” Loki started, but he was cut off when Tony shoved his down flat to the bed. The god just laughed into the pillows, smug as ever.

Then Tony was loosening the pants with hurried movements and shimmying them down bit by bit over the curve of Loki’s hips, still a tight fit because Tony was too impatient now to stop and untie the knots further.

Then the pants were off and Tony was crawling back up the line of Loki’s legs. His face came even with the corset laces where they still criss-crossed over Loki’s spine, and he kissed Loki’s back through the leather cords.

He prepared Loki roughly, far more so than he ever would a human lover, barely pausing for the god to whisper words to make lubricant appear on his fingers before pushing them in and spreading them fast, pushing to meet resistance. He could hear Loki gasping and grabbing at the pillows to have something to grip.

After a minimum of preparation, Tony withdrew his hand, shoved his own boxers down and started pushing roughly into Loki. Then everything was slick and tight and perfect rhythm, vibrations and wrecked cries and need and heat and cord wound tight finally snapping slack as Tony came hard and Loki tightened around him in dizzy spasms and he heard himself whisper, “Loki,” over and over against the still-knotted laces arrayed over Loki’s back.

Loki made a broken noise when Tony’s motions stopped completely. He pulled out, and rolled them over together onto their sides, both shaking, and when Loki repositioned himself onto his back, Tony noted with relieved exhaustion that the god had come right along with him. Good.

He rested his head against the naked expanse of Loki’s shoulder, completely worn out, taken for all he was worth, even if he had done the more literal taking. Loki vanished the corset so he could more easily recover his breath, and Tony ran his hand gently down that now exposed torso, slick with sweat that hadn’t escaped, and shifted so they could more easily rest, side by side and wrapped up in each other.

After a while, Tony recovered enough to think, and tilted his head toward Loki. “So what is the overarching plan?”

Loki kissed the top of his head fondly and said, “Considering you performace today, I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.”


	7. Creative Sexual Positions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Plant Kingdom AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I need to do a bit of explaining for this one. I got pretty stumped about what kind of sex a genius playboy and a Norse god of mischief would deem creative, so I asked for suggestions.
> 
> After getting very little response, I got desperate and posted this:
> 
> “Seriously, if someone doesn’t prompt me with a creative sexual position for day seven, I am going to turn Tony and Loki into plants and write porn about them.
> 
> It with involve things like quivering fronds and wet glistening leaves.
> 
> It will be creepy.
> 
> Save yourselves?”
> 
> I had really underestimated the internet. A few hours later, I was forced to add this update to the post:
> 
> “UPDATE: Okay, so I’ve literally had two people separately request that one of the plants be a bromeliad. Plant porn it is, you perverts.”
> 
> Here is the result.

Loki climbed slowly up the tree that was his home, curling carefully up the contours of its nine branches as the other lifeforms of the rainforest crawled and crept and grew beside him. He was a plant always out of place.  _Invasive species_ , everyone whispered nowadays, and inched away when his stems tread near them.  _Parasite_. Doomed to strangle and bring the downfall of the very tree that housed him, and then start over at a new tree, repeat the neverending cycle. Helpless to be anything but a destructive force in this alien forest.

There was a bromeliad a little ways up in the canopy, Tony, the only one who didn’t avoid conversation with him. Bright red leaves sharp against the first layer of real sunlight, all vivid and arrogant.  They would whisper insults back and forth to each other. “What’s up, twisty?”

“Hard to say. You obscure the view.”

“Then feast your eyes. I’m a work of natural art.”

“You’re a glorified pineapple, and by all rights you should be hanging in a pot of dirt in some tasteless region of suburbia.”

“You should talk. Don’t you belong in a sushi restaurant a few continents over?”

“Just because you’re indigenous — ”

“Sorry, can’t hear you, got some dirt clogged between my bracts, did you say I’m  _ingenious_? Excellent observation, Loki. You just might fit in on my tree after all.”

That was another thing. Tony always managed to be under the impression that this was his tree. In fact he seemed awfully convinced that the whole forest was his, for a plant so vulnerable. Such a delicate balance, such slender roots holding him upright. Dislodge a few here and there and the acerbic plant would be no more, a splatter far down on the forest floor. The thought amused Loki at first.

Time went by, their conversations grew fiercer and more engaging, and that same thought began to trouble Loki.

Then it began to terrify him.

Who would trade scathing remarks with him if those roots were crushed and torn, those boldly colored leaves drowned in darkness? Who would speak to him? Who would know him?

Loki wasn’t going to let that happen.

And he began to address Tony with a very different set of remarks. Promises, about what would happen when the vine finally climbed high enough to draw even with the bromeliad. How he would wrap around him, a latticework of fine branches woven between Tony’s leaves, keeping him trapped and safe and  _Loki’s_.

And Loki took in Tony’s reactions to his words with satisfaction,  how his leaves went dry and his circulation sped to replace the moisture, how the water pooled between his inflorescences would ripple with pleased anticipation.

Tony didn’t shy away from him like the other flora. Instead, those bracts would shift imperceptibly toward Loki, spreading just a little further open and showing off his finer colors. And those roots would creep just a little lower, moving closer to Loki, and Tony would say, “Yeah, and then what?” Challenging him to go on.

When Loki reached the sunlit canopy he started to sprout leaves in abundance, drinking in the daylight with ravenous hunger. And Tony observed the change with a different kind of hunger. The vine wasn’t in season to flower just now — shame, that — but every shade of green flickered in the jumble of those leaves, from sun drenched near-yellow to deeper forest greens and blacks where Loki wound through his own shadows in twining, helical patterns. The darkest blacks held an almost thrilling danger, a reminder of Loki’s nature, his inclination to bring death wherever he climbed high enough to consume and blot out the sun overhead.

The first tendrils of Loki’s winding branches touched Tony’s roots, nimble and searching. Tony could feel the flowers at his center spreading open already at just that touch, blooming through the surface of the water there, all arousal and anticipation. And Loki kept going, weaving up through the tangled tapestry of Tony’s roots, binding them together and oh-so-careful not to let his leaves block the path of Tony’s sunlight.

It took an eternity and those clever shoots of vine seemed to be unmaking him even as by all accounts Loki was fixing him solidly in place. Then Loki wound his way up around Tony’s bracts, occasionally following the lines of those leaves right down into their clasping crevices.

Tony retaliated by tightening the grip of his roots on Loki’s branches and Loki went still as he took in the sensation of that. Then for a long time they were lost in a delicious war of sliding and pressing and touching and further tangling, but Loki had the advantage of flexibility and scope and...

“Would you  _stop teasing_?” Tony demanded —  _begged_  — as Loki slowly traced the circle of Tony’s water vessel, liquid glistening where it reflected a shard of the morning forest sun.

“Never,” Loki refused smugly, but still he did start to spiral inward then, gradually making his way from the edge of the water pool toward the wet petals that stood wide open by now, all too receptive Loki’s touch when he finally brushed against those delicate stamens.

“Shit, Loki, yes, more of that…” Tony felt that touch radiate through him in waves, washing from his stems to his bracts to his roots, and Loki was still wreaking havoc with his senses on that front.

The tables turned a little when Tony found the fine hairs on the underside of Loki’s leaves and skimmed a bract lightly under them, and Loki reacted with a reverent curse and Tony’s name. The branch curling into Tony’s flowers jerked sharply, strumming hard over his anthers, and Tony swore, suddenly lost in ecstasy as his pollen scattered. The feeling was intense and good and almost too much, his stamens still vibrating wildly as they carried the motion. His flowers started to close instinctively, incidentally contracting around the point where Loki was still inside him, and that was too much for Loki.

The vine went over the edge, his branches tightened sporadically around the tree, leaves quivering with the tremors of orgasm. Then, slowly, he relaxed, overwhelmed with a feeling that was unfamiliar and very like bliss. A light breeze sent another rustling shudder through him as it blew cool air over the dew gathering along the smooth planes of his laminae. Loki’s vine retreated from the pool at Tony’s center, coming away liberally dusted with pollen.

Evening found them still tired from their exertions,  still intertwined, and not at all inclined to disentangle ever again.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the story of why I spent two days of my life researching plant anatomy.
> 
> There is now a wonderful fanart of this chapter [here](http://mioishin.tumblr.com/post/116722102186/from-challange-and-answer-by-roseapprentice-this).


	8. Dominance/submission and Pain Play

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote the first half of this for Day 8 and then finished it for Day 21. When we get to chapter 21, I'll post some kind of bonus ficlet.
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** sadomasochism, rough sex, a bit of gore, a hint of breath play, bad BDSM practice, and angsty power dynamics. Don't Dom angry at home, kids.

Dominance was a function of helplessness. Loki knew that well enough, and that was why he was usually the one who took, the one controlled and fucked and demanded, directed, possessed. Because Loki was the second son, the broken plan, the loosened grip at a pivotal moment. The wavering hesitance of winding thought when the worlds demanded a simple and resolute king.

He shook where he ought to be still, and shook wildly out of scale, earthquake and storm and avalanche. And when his thoughts scattered defiantly where he prompted them to still, when memories — failures — _shame_  — raked through him like knives through a creature already wounded and shaking and feral… when that happened, he would take Tony under and remind himself what power was.

Dominance was a function of helplessness. Loki knew that well enough, and he recognized all too well the ferocious helplessness that was consuming his lover just now.

Loki was himself in a calm mood today, and just now utilizing a lifetime of practice being unobtrusive, making a quiet show of reading on a couch in one of the far corners of the workshop and playing at being little more than another work of furniture himself.

Tony was prowling his own workshop like a caged animal.  _A species of large cat. Something with very prominent shoulder blades_ , Loki thought appreciatively as he watched Tony’s back roll with angry, fluid motions of his steps. The hero paced and took violent turns and occasionally stopped to smash something inanimate and expensive.

Another round of Stark weaponry had arrived on the black market, and Tony had a very specific plan for moments like this: find, destroy, and keep innocent people from dyeing Tony’s ledger a deeper red.

But SHIELD wanted to leave it, trace it, follow the money, and find out if there was more where the last stock had come from. Wouldn’t even give Tony the locations where the missiles were being stored in case the hero decided to do something rash.

And they were right, and Tony knew they were right, and their plan was better than his plan, and they weren’t giving him a choice, and it was  _his damned weapons_  they were playing their political games with.

Loki could almost hear the agitated circling of Tony’s thoughts, constantly running up against that same wall of  _there’s nothing I can do_ , and spinning on regardless, gaining the momentum of defiance and past betrayals and present resolve to take action, and leading nowhere. It was the sort of helplessness that broke a person with his own strength, and Tony’s eyes were dark with it, seeking an outlet for the brutality escalating in his psyche. Pacing was giving way to more constant destruction now. The room was filling up with noise, with the creaks of bending metal and the snaps of cracking plastic, loud collisions and the occasional low yell from Tony himself.

There were a few items in the shop that did make the man pause and move on, remembering their value and unwilling to damage them even this state of mind: a well-loved car, scattered sections of what would become the next suit of armor, and… Loki, whenever the inventor’s eyes flickered to the god and then immediately tore away to forcefully redirect his focus to the dismemberment of something else just as still and far less sentient.

Loki knew that Tony’s current coping method was no help to him, no real distraction. This was just destruction, meaningless and  _easy_. It was unsatisfying for its imprecision. You couldn’t focus wholly on the demolition of an object, not like you could lose youself to crafting the downfall of a man’s sanity. Loki felt a distinct curl of anticipation twist through him at the notion of Tony Stark worked up enough to try that, to trap Loki and push him and break his composure and then push harder to crack the thing underneath that was his will.

And Tony did seem about that worked up by now.

Loki closed his book over one carefully placed finger to hold his place, tilted his head up and addressed Tony airily. “My safeword is ‘Aristotle.’ In case you were wondering.” And he went back to reading. He heard Tony’s footsteps halt, giving way to a dangerous quiet, and the trickster smiled to himself without looking up.

There was a sort of poetic justice, he supposed, in the experience of being hefted up by his throat and tossed flat to Tony’s floor. He landed on his back on a plastic section of flooring, a light, strong surface designed to move smoothly aside to make way for the mechanisms that once attached a now outdated model of Tony’s armor.

Tony pulled off his own shirt before stalking closer. Loki lay still and watched him approach with wary eyes, even as his lips quirked up smugly. “Ah. You  _were_  wondering.”

“Not so much wondering  _that exact thing_ , no. Opens up interesting possibilities, though.” Tony picked up Loki’s book where it had fallen almost as haphazardly as Loki, and placed it neatly on a nearby table, eerily controlled after his outburst, and… maybe Loki had misjudged. Maybe Tony wasn’t so far gone as he’d surmised.

“Something else, then?” Loki queried.

“Mm,” Tony agreed minimally, and turned a little to lean his hips back against the table, crossing his arms. “Strip. Don’t get up, just stay where you are and take off your clothes.”

Loki casually obeyed, not showing how the new quiet in Tony’s mood set him on edge. He was hyperaware of the inventor right now, his stance, his focused expression, the rhythm of his breath, as the trickster searched almost frantically for cues to Tony’s unreadable thoughts. Loki found himself forcefully regulating the sound of his own breathing, on the off-chance that Tony spoke and he needed to analyze the slight expression in his voice. The attempt reminded him of being a child alone at night, forcing unnatural silence on himself to hide from imagined monsters outside the window.

Loki finished tossing his clothes aside, pants and underwear together the last to go. Tony pushed off from the table and knelt down next to him. He rested a hand lightly on Loki’s belly, and it was a testament to how wound up the god was that his cock almost completely hardened just at the warm weight of skin on skin a few inches northward. Loki let out a long breath that failed entirely to be as silent as those previous.

Tony frowned thoughtfully and trailed his hand down. His free hand pulled a bottle of lube from the pocket of the pants he still wore, and the fingers approaching Loki’s groin retreated as Tony slicked his palm. The he went back to touching exactly where he’d left off, and Loki shuddered as that hand slid up his length, warm and lovely and far sooner than he’d expected. Pocketing the bottle again, Tony reached one hand down to rest on the floor so he could lean over Loki while his hand kept moving, fast and thorough.

It was something of a tradition between them to assert control by going slow, by taking things right to the edge and then dragging out that moment of desperation to its blackest limits, seeing who cracked first.

So when Tony jacked Loki straight through his first climax without pause or preamble, Loki was startled by it, a little bit of fear — confusion? — lacing itself like poison through the slam of too-soon orgasm as it knocked all his perceptions breathlessly askew. They’d only just started and already he didn’t know Tony’s game.

But he started to know it soon enough as the aftershocks fell away and Tony’s hand kept sliding over him, grating against hypersensitive nerves. Loki whimpered and then swore fiercely. “Tony, damnit, that -”

“Quiet,” Tony commanded abruptly, the order almost disinterested for its surety. Like Loki’s body was Tony’s own project to bend, and Loki’s objection carried no more weight than an automated warning, thoughtlessly batted aside. His hand kept its unfazed rhythm and he watched Loki’s face intently as the pain played across the trickster’s features, eyes shutting tightly and mouth falling open in now-silent complaint. Loki was burning, not able to enjoy the pleasant, slow breaths of post-orgasm as they were being driven from him by suffocating friction. One of his hands found Tony’s free arm and he dug his fingers in hard.

And Tony was bending down to kiss along the lines of Loki’s neck and shoulder with intimate precision, just as Loki liked it, as if Tony wasn’t hurting him. And it was throwing him off, so jarring, the rough inflicting of pain and the gentle slide of lips along his collarbone and on top of it all the impersonal tone in the inventor’s voice when he drew his mouth back and said, “Hand  _off_. Both arms up over your head. There. Keep them there.”

Loki wanted to hold tight to some anchor, but he obeyed and let Tony’s commands roll through him like lava, burning and sliding and cooling to something immovable, an irresistible weight. In this moment Tony’s word was law and stone, and Loki squirmed and resisted it and yielded to it and loved it. His cock was finally starting to harden again under Tony’s touch, hot sparks of pain rolling up to collect low in his belly and beginning to give off something a little more like warmth, but still it grated. And Tony was still kissing a delicate line from Loki’s jaw down to the center of his chest, soft and perfect and sending a melting heat through his blood.

Just as Loki’s cock grew receptive to the touch again, it changed, the motions of Tony’s hand turning jerkier and madly sporadic, too hard and quick for anything that was quite pleasure to remain in it, and Loki was gritting his teeth with the urge to move his hand down and stall the arm behind the touch. He looked to the man for some sign of lost control, and found only patience and a terrifying analytical glint in those dark eyes. He had succeeded at turning Tony’s anger into something cold and quiet and arguably far more dangerous than the rash, destructive mood that had overtaken the man a few minutes ago.

Loki couldn’t help taking some satisfaction in that achievement, in the melting down of raw destructive forces and the creation of something sleeker and more deadly, even if all the precision that Tony’s anger had aligned into was now aimed at him. Loki had a bad habit of using himself as bait to bring out the worst in people, and he’d not before now had the hazardous pleasure of meeting the worst in Tony Stark.

He admired the precision and strength of the body leaning over him, the brown of his eyes (usually soft and just now losing to hard black), the warm tones of his skin, the dips and shadows. Loki wanted to touch, but refrained. Instead, he hissed in frustrated not-quite-pain at the unpleasant motions of Tony’s hand.

Tony looked pleased at that, an expression that could have been called warmth or affection if not for the sadism of its context. “So. Earlier I was wondering. I was wondering if you look as good begging me to stop touching you as you do when you’re beggin me to start. A few thorough trials should do it. The question is, which test should I do first?” Tony’s hand slowed to a teasing caress, smooth and measured and making an art of being  _almost_  exactly right,  _almost_  enough pressure, _almost_  enough speed, finally letting Loki ease into the more familiar game, balancing pleasure and desperation.

But still it was different, disquieting. There was harder edge to the desperation, a sense of threat that had only been theoretical between them before and now felt abrasively real. “You know this one, Loki. It’s a game of ‘uncle.’ Always is.”

“And how long would you like me hold out today?” Loki asked in a strained voice, a question of complete submission, but with a barely-traceable hint of mocking underneath.

“Long as you like. But when one experiment ends, we start in on the other.”

“You’ll start to hurt me when I give in,” Loki summed up, already shifting into the touch and feeling Tony decrease the pressure in retaliation.

To Loki’s words, Tony just smiled his agreement and returned to kissing his neck, the soft pressure of pliable lips warm against Loki’s throat, and it was dizzying and cruel and gentle and confusing, and Loki was having trouble getting his mind clear to make sense of it all. A long time passed in measured friction and stifled shifts of Loki’s hips, in hands twisting longingly at empty air and pleas bitten back.

The trance finally cracked when Tony gave a little, wrapping his fingers around Loki’s dick with a hint of real pressure and dragging up, and Loki bit back a noise that came out anyway, stifled and pleased. A rush of relief, of released tension, like bliss and perfection and an oath filled at the verge of breaking. It flooded through in a wave —

— that cut short as Tony jerked his hand away, leaving Loki isolated and aching and his breath catching in bitter disappointment. The writhing need for  _more_  rang deeper in Loki’s mind as he caught Tony’s eyes and saw the clear, analytical light there. Shadowed with that blend of determination and rage Loki was after, but  _still_  that look stuck through him with a ring of _not enough_  that echoed the itching need tugging at his limbs.

Loki was the enemy and his body was the weapon Tony was crafting against him. Loki had found his way under the whims of the cool metallic workings of Tony’s mind; problem solving, in control. Right now, the mechanical genius was thinking a hair too clearly. Holding back, because so far holding back was the name of the game.

And that unswerving control held a lovely appeal, but there was a very precise balance point between a weapon held steady and a weapon held in shaking hands, and Loki wanted to ride that line and watch it cut deep to the core of Tony’s soul. Dominance was a function of helplessness, and Loki wanted to see Tony helpless with it, if only just.

So time to stop holding back. “Tony. Please.”

Those clear eyes narrowed in suspicion, and the darker thing behind them looked pleased. “Giving so soon.”

“How could I not? You are, after all, the  _great_  Tony Stark,” Loki said it almost straight, with reverence thick in his voice, but again that edge of sarcasm, detectible only to someone who knew him well. A sharp and reckless slap in the face to the one man who knew him best.

A muscle in Tony’s jaw twitched. “I said  _quiet_  earlier. You didn’t listen.”

“And of course you can do something about it. You who are after all… powerful. Unstoppable. And if you’ve let yourself be fettered and used, and then  _cast aside_  to sit in your corner when your usefulness expires, well the-”

Loki stopped and drew in a breath when Tony dug a thumb hard into the tender spot on his outer thigh. The pain was sharp, but it was milder than the message under it, that Tony knew the weak spots just as well as Loki did.

And Loki saw the way Tony’s eyes lit at the sound of that indrawn breath. It was a flicker of startled, pleased revelation, and oh it was so easy to read the feeling of unexpected satisfaction in that face. Satisfaction at seeing Loki in pain, at the power inherent in moving to inflict hurt and seeing hurt come about in perfect answer and in perfect time.

Tony made his way up Loki’s torso, all teeth and fingernails and Loki bit his lip to keep quiet with some feeble echo of dignity and felt Tony smile against bruised and dented skin every time he found a point and a pressure that made a high noise of complaint vibrate unwillingly in Loki’s throat.

Pain was less familiar to Loki here, in this company, but as a rule Loki could take pain more easily than he could take almost-pleasure. The burn of inflamed cuts and forming bruises was sweeter and simpler than wanting and being denied, and his thoughts cleared a little even as his head struck hard plastic flooring at Tony’s manhandling, lifting his shoulders and then pushing them sharply to the ground and kissing Loki roughly before the god could recover the breath he’d expelled at the blow.

 _Better_ , Loki thought with satisfaction and a pleasant, curling kind of fear sliding low in his belly as he focused on inhaling through his nose and Tony threatened that focus by pillaging his mouth with injurious force and slick teeth until Loki tasted his own blood in the kiss. The rich metal-and-salt taste of his lifeblood matched so well against the slide of Tony’s tongue in his mouth that Loki was lost in that one sensation for a long moment, until Tony pulled too roughly at his hair to form an unyielding grip and bent Loki’s head back to deepen an already all-consuming kiss. Loki stopped breathing as blood and saliva pooled uncomfortably in the back of his throat, and he felt himself start to struggle. Tony let up for a moment, hands still tangled painfully in his hair, and Loki swallowed thickly.

Tony bit at his ear, not hard enough to break skin, but so close that Loki’s body sensed that it was on the verge of being torn open, and protested more than if blood were already drawn and nerves severed. “Clothes. Condom. Magic,” Tony ordered, and the words were only just intelligible with his teeth closed around Loki’s anthelix, but the command was clear enough. Loki muttered the appropriate spell, sheathing Tony’s cock and vanishing the clothes confining his body, revealing muscle and arching dominance.

Tony rewarded him by biting harder, breaking the tense balance point between whole and broken skin. He moved one hand down from Loki’s hair to grip his hip and started to push into him without preparation, and Loki opened his mouth to struggle for breath, little whimper-like “ _huh_ "s coming out as each exhale caught in his throat at the pain and the attempt to relax into it.

Loki looked up into Tony’s eyes from where his head was angled awkwardly back by Tony’s remaining hand, and Loki smiled even as he huffed in pain and he felt a cut in his lip spread open at the pull and felt the wetness of blood drip off toward the corner of his jaw. Tony was in the grip of all the force of frustration, all the spiralling thoughts that drove him to take and control, and ambiguity of whether Loki was prey defiant and running or prey caught and cowering was further destabilizing. The man above him was all lost in the confusing oscillation between  _attack_  and  _play_. Too curious for his own good, Loki started to struggle again and this time Tony only pushed harder, twisting fingers more tightly into Loki’s hair and pulling sharp pain through his scalp. Rage burned fierce for having been given direction, and Tony was shaking with it, and nearly shaking apart with the half-remembered knowledge of what rage could break if given free rein.

Loki was the one  _not_  helpless, the one who could end this with a word or a spell or an assertion of strength. Certainly not helpless. He told himself that as the as his body finally adjusted to fully enjoy the way Tony was thrusting into him, and waves of pleasure started to wash through Loki’s bruised and lacerated body, making the pain wonderfully alive, warmth sweeping through everything stinging and sore and intensifying the feeling to something sharp and sweet and full, pounding away at him until he couldn’t think. A promise kept on the verge of breaking. No, he wasn’t helpless; just mindless, writhing and muttering urgently, begging desperately for what Tony was already doing to him.

Pain could make pleasure more intense. Mentally he knew that, he recalled it. But this was real and close, staggering and fearful. It was skin dragging against skin and hard friction and soft flesh scabbing over and breaking open again and he was losing himself to something fragmented and sharp that was probably the approach of a searing orgasm and a terrifying, breath-catching fall.

Loki screamed with it as he came, low and pained and perfect. He was full of a melting, cracking heat that for a moment he was sure caused the universe to expand and contract beyond its own integrity and break a little along all its weakest points.  _Tony does know the weak spots_ , Loki recalled disconnectedly as the man kept fucking him and the world narrowed and it wrung Loki of all the pleasure his senses could process, eventually twisting him past those limits and back into pain. Loki could hear distantly that he was begging Tony to stop in much the same broken tones he’s been using earlier to beg him to go on.

Tony came a good while later with a low scream to echo Loki’s, and a series of jerky movements that spasmed through Loki’s blood with a firebrand sting. Tony slowed to a halt and went completely still, a kind of deathly silence falling around them even as the sound of them both desperately working to recover their breath filled the room.

Tony rolled away into his back, all that predatory rage fallen away, and Loki turned gingerly onto his side to watch carefully as the expressions played across the man’s face.

It was a terrifying thing to feel the burn of anger fade and realize that the aftertaste was bitter, and someone had seen you for the man you normally refrained from becoming.

Loki knew that low. He knew the humiliation that echoed back after every moment of power. Tony lay still, with his eyes closed and his arms bent up, fingers curled to his forehead. It was a pose of exhaustion and dawning realization, of introspection and grim, quiet shame. “Why did you let me do that?”

“It’s nothing I haven’t done to you.”

“Not like this,” Tony shook his head, and there was brokenness in his voice.

“Yes.  _Exactly_  like this,” Loki corrected sharply, suddenly finding that he needed Tony to understand. Refraining from saying,  _Like this and far worse_ , where he know it would not help, he pulled down at Tony’s near arm until the inventor lowered the limb and looked at him. “We are alike, you and I. I never  _take_  from anyone the way I take from you. I am never known by anyone. When am I self-indulgent, except in tricks played just beyond the the corners of their eyes? With  _you_. When am I powerful except by disguise and illusion? With  _you_.”

Tony’s eyes flicked to the side in an  _I don’t see where you’re going with this_ expression. “Why?”

“Because it feels like  _this_ ,” Loki gestured with his eyes up and down Tony’s body, indicating the man in all his isolating shame. “Because a fall from the heights of dominance leaves me broken, helpless against ridicule and betrayal. And  _you_ …” Loki trailed off, unable to find the words. And more than that, unwilling to subject his own weakness to further analysis and articulation. So he focused on Tony and went on, “I would have you as you are now, like me, beside me and broken by your own power.”

He leaned up on one arm to look Tony in the face from just above, reclaiming a little of the dominant part he’d so eagerly surrendered earlier, shifting their relative roles just enough that it was ambiguous who was in control, each raw and cautious with how little they could hide from the other. He leaned down to kiss Tony and they both inhaled sharply at the touch on hypersensitive skin, the pain Tony had inflicted on Loki earlier, now drastically muted and shared, and they leaned in and pressed harder. A kiss that raked through them like knives through creatures already wounded and shaking.

Loki set his head down again and they fell asleep there, and found comfort in forgetting what power was.


	9. Double Penetration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A sweet little threesome with Pepper Potts.

He tried to focus.

Loki’s world was red-tinted gold, fine threads of it scattering up against his mouth as he worked to inhale. The smell of Pepper’s shampoo was heady and mixing with those of fresh sweat and sweet moans. But no, moans weren’t a smell…

He tried to focus.

Loki’s world was soft curves and warm skin, surrounding him completely where he was buried to the hilt between the curves of Pepper’s ass. He leaned back enough for his eyes to follow the indent of her spine all the way down until it disappeared and the lines of her figure flared out, engulfing him. And the sight of that —  _damn it all_  he shouldn’t have looked.

He tried to focus.

It was Tony leaning up across from him who finally snapped him out of it, literally by snapping two fingers in front of his face. “Hey, La La Land, we kind of need you working with us here.”

Loki took a sharp breath and finally recalled his surroundings. They were in Tony’s bed, the three of them, and Loki had just finished the slow and pleasant task of stretching Pepper far enough that he could be comfortably buried in her. And then just as he was nearly done, Pepper had gotten impatient and reached back and  _pulled him in_ , which was about where Loki had lost the thread of things. And the move disengaged her from Tony under them, where she had been leisurely fucking the mortal while Loki worked.

Tony’s fingers were still waving in his face, so Loki took the opportunity to bite very lightly at them and watch the inventor swallow reflexively at the sharpness of the motion and the predatory grin the god was now gracing him with.

Releasing Tony’s fingers, Loki took hold of Pepper’s hips while Pepper got a firm grip on Tony’s shoulders, and together they lowered her carefully back onto Tony’s cock and watched the inventor further lose his composure, closing his eyes tightly and then opening them wide, trying like Loki to focus as his breathing grew less and less even and huffed out in ragged half-whines.

Loki and Pepper moaned in unison at the feeling of Tony’s cock filling her up. Loki could feel the increase in pressure rolling up against him, and once Tony was in, Loki pulled back and gave a slow thrust, giving him a hint of what that felt like, which drew a gasp from Tony and a low shout from Pepper, who pulled up and jerked down again on them both, and everyone groaned again.

They started up a rolling rhythm, Pepper rocking down onto Tony as he came up to meet her, Loki finishing each thrust just an instant later and then pushing with hips and hands, helping her kneel up enough for the next beat. And the air filled with their whispered curses and encouragements and the uttering of each other’s names, until the world started to narrow and breath came a little too short.

Moving one hand up to her shoulder, Loki pulled Pepper backward to lean against his chest, stealing away some of her leverage and giving Tony a better angle to grind up into her and make her shudder and start to come apart. Once he had weight, Loki trailed his hand down from her shoulder, up and down her side, and he found her ear and told her the effect she had on him in words he couldn’t track on their way out, but they had their desired impact and she leaned her head back farther on his shoulder as they rode her through the height of her orgasm.

Loki came next, losing himself with a shudder and feeling both of tightening and going slack, like losing himself in them was the same being bound to them. It was just as he was coming down that he felt the erratic motions of Tony following them over the edge, swearing brokenly even as he fell.

Loki was still holding Pepper’s weight, and he eased them both over to fall gently on their sides next to Tony, landing so the three were still tangled up together while Pepper laughed breathlessly for sheer bliss, and Loki burrowed his face tiredly under her shoulder, not allowing either of them to see how softly he smiled.


	10. Explaining a Kink to their Partner

Tony wouldn’t take his hand.

Loki was sure of it now. The pattern was too consistent to be ignored. Otherwise, Tony seemed easygoing enough about physical touch. He would pat shoulders as he went by, hug, even kiss someone’s cheek in casual affection if the mood struck, and Loki was not excluded from that. It was just…

As Tony’s lover, Loki wasn’t exactly content to settle for “not excluded.”

So Loki would go to take his hand. Walking in the city streets. Sitting down for a meal with Tony’s friends and fellow heroes. And Tony would squirm away, or realize suddenly that he needed to reset his watch or refill his plate. Something that required the dexterity of two free appendages.

Tony would fuck him, Tony  _claimed_  to love him, but in the presence of the world beyond the two of them, Tony wouldn’t take his hand.

One day when Tony was standing at his work table, Loki finally sat down across from him and called Tony out on it.

And Tony just said, “Yeah. I was gonna talk to you about that. Hand-holding. Could you maybe not do that? I feel a little weird about it, so maybe you could not try when we’re with people, or in front of the press, you know. It’s just… yeah. Weird. Okay. Good talk.”

Tony got a closer look at Loki’s face.

“Okay.  _Bad_  talk, apparently.” Tony sat, holding out his (apparently forbidden) hands in a pacifying gesture. “First off, please don’t kill me. Second off, please explain the  _why_  behind the about-to-kill-me look.”

Loki’s mouth twisted in an expression distantly related to a cold smile. “It’s nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” Tony just sat and waited for more.

“I’m involved with a man,” Loki stated, “Who won’t so much as _touch my hand_. And I had  _really thought_ … Well. I suppose it was my turn to be lied to.”

“Whoa. I am not turning you down, here! Look, this is  _not_  a  _never_  thing. It’s just not something I like to do in public.”

“Not something you like to do in public,” Loki repeated slowly. “Tony, either you’re under the impression I don’t know how to work an online video player, or you are honestly suggesting that you’re more comfortable being seen _naked_  or  _drunkenly pissing your armor_  than being seen holding hands with  _me_.”

Tony blinked. “Well when you put it like that it sounds kind of bad.”

Loki stood to leave.

“Wait. Please, it’s not what it sounds like, it’s just —  _will you let me explain_?” he demanded as Loki walked away.

The god turned as he reached the door, gesturing acerbically with open hands in a way that encapsulated both his position standing to listen and his proximity to the exit.

Tony set his teeth in a pained expression of thought and fluttered his fingers searchingly through the air as he looked for the words. “It’s a turn-on for me,” he admitted. “Holding hands is. More than kissing. Well kissing  _most_ people, anyway. Your kissing you could probably win you an olympic gold medal. In any sport where you opted to make out with the judges. Not the point. Okay. So. Yes. Hand-holding. Not something I do in situations where being…  _visibly turned on_  might be a bad thing.”

Loki frowned at him, anger gone, and stepped closer.

Tony’s shoulders slumped in relief as his lover approached. “We good now? I’m not rejecting you here, I’m really not.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Tony shrugged helplessly. “I’m an idiot.”

“That’s not exactly a reason.”

“No, that’s a valid reason for just about everything from the geopolitical arms distribution to Pepper’s last birthday present, which — don’t ask.  _Really_.”

Loki just stood and waited for more.

“It’s embarrassing, okay?”

Loki finally cracked a real smile, though there was still tightness around its edges. “The birthday present or the kink?”

“Both, but I meant the kink.”

Within reach now, Loki held out his hand to Tony, the mood between them sobered. An offer, and a challenge to the man to prove it really was propriety and not some genuine repulsion that had kept him from returning the gesture.

Tony readily took Loki’s hand, wrapping it in warmth and light calluses.

Perhaps it was just the shift in focus, the attention Loki was now granting the sensation, but in this moment it did feel… significant. He felt like someone had him. He belonged. He was owned, possessed, wanted,  _claimed_.

And more than that, Tony’s hands were his weapons. To build, to dial, to feel and alter the universe, and it was amazing how defenseless you could make him for an instant by putting something in his hands. And Loki’s fingers, just now cool against Tony’s warm palm, were just as dangerous, just skilled, just as much compromised when wrapped up in someone else like this.

It occurred to Loki just how odd it was that both their cultures considered this a casual form of touch. For all the sensitivity of hands, for all the cleverness and all the ways they could caress or intertwine, this was seen as ordinary. He ran an exploratory thumb over the back of Tony’s fingers, the wrinkles and give of the skin over his knuckles, and he heard Tony’s breath catch, saw him subtly shift in his seat, seeking a less uncomfortable position.

Loki’s eyes moved from their clasped hands, up Tony’s arm and finally to his face, and Loki smiled in a way that never served to put anyone at ease. “Tony, let me lead you to bed like this.”

Tony made a strangled, “Nn,” sound that was probably agreement, and Loki lightly tugged the man to his feet, and moved over guide him in the direction of the bedroom, walking backward as Tony followed like a man hypnotized.

The trance was broken when Tony winced at the constricting pressure of his jeans, and Loki stopped to step up close to him, shifting their joined hands up to fold between the two men’s faces as Loki’s free hand undid the button and zipper of Tony’s jeans. He gave Tony’s length one decisive stroke, and meanwhile treated the back of Tony’s had to a lingering kiss, something sweet and soft that either didn’t belong mixed in with baser pleasure, or belonged there entirely, interlaced like their fingers.

They didn’t make it to the bed. They just found their way closer to the floor under them and gave each other desperate hand jobs, the kind where they lay face to face and watched each other shake and fall apart, acknowledgment and broken things and the kind of release that let them feel afterward that they could really breathe, like receding tides and the sting of saltwater on a wound, clean and tired.

When all was said and done, Tony wouldn’t let go his hand.


	11. Explaining Their Relationship to a Disapproving Third Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one with Pepper in it. In related news, I found a way to make this prompt really pornful.

“What do you mean,  _you’re still enemies_?” Pepper demanded, but her irritation got lost a little to breathlessness as Loki licked at the folds between her legs, and she closed her eyes and took a deep, theoretically steadying breath before continuing. “Tony, spell this out for me. How do you two plan - fuck.”

Pepper’s back was flat to the bed, Tony leaning over her where they had been kissing until he casually mentioned that his…  _working_ _relationship_ with Loki hadn’t actually changed.

Loki was situated toward the foot of the bed, kneeling with his bowed head framed by Pepper’s thighs. The sight of what exactly he was doing was lost behind the tumble of his dark hair, but Tony could guess enough from how distracted Pepper was fighting not to be, and how her hand tightened at unpredictable intervals in the sheets balled up between her fingers.

Tony was holding his head up a few inches above Pepper’s, a little dazed even just watching her reactions, but he replied to her question. “Here, like this, we’re together. As soon as Loki leaves, he goes back villaining and I go back to heroing. Simple enough.”

“ _Simple_ ,” Pepper repeated in an unencouraging tone. “This…” She closed her eyes again and the strain of concentration bled into her voice as Loki did whatever he was doing with his mouth. “What we have. Isn’t. Even. Simple. Without you two. On opposite sides. There. Lower.  _Yes_. Of a war.”

Tony trailed a hand down between Pepper’s breasts, coming to rest low on her belly. He stared down into her face and shrugged in a manner at odds with the conviction in his eyes. “Well, I’m an Avenger. It’s kind of a thing I do. And Loki battles the Avengers. That’s kind of a thing  _he_  does.”

Pepper lifted her head to meet that look with a clash of equal conviction. “Well if one of you dies in those stupid battles, I’ll make sure the other lives to regret it.”

Loki lifted his head and wiped his mouth on the inside of one extended wrist. “If I may - ”

“ _Don’t you fucking stop_ ,” Pepper ordered.

Loki smiled at that and lowered his hand to rub one thumb firmly over her clit, not quite obeying, his smile widening when her head fell back anyway and she groaned, low and rough and not-quite-begging, and Loki did it again just to hear that sound again. “I have no intention of  _killing_  your pet inventor.”

“I’m not her pet!” Tony objected.

At the same time as Pepper said, “He’s not my —  _oh_  god, Loki,  _do that again_.”

Loki wrapped his free arm around one of Pepper’s bent legs and rested his chin comfortably on her knee while the fingers of his right hand repeated a staggered dragging motion over the sensitive spot he’d just found. “If Tony decides to risk his life interfering in my endeavors, that’s his loss. And if he decides to  _die_  interfering in my endeavors…”

“Not exactly something I would _decide_ ,” Tony pointed out.

“What  _do_  you call the incident with the missile and the wormhole then?” Loki inquired.

“Playing long odds.”

Loki returned his eyes to Pepper. “I’ll happily hunt down any sentient being responsible for his death, but I can hardly be counted among that group if he goes looking for trouble where he perfectly well knows it will find him.”

“Yes, you ca…” Pepper trailed off as Loki lightened the pressure of his fingers in response to each word. “Damn it, Loki, you can’t win this argument by…  _damn it_.”

“I’m changing up this game,” Tony decided, and kissed Pepper again in mild farewell before moving away. He crawled over to Loki, moved close against him and kissed the top of his shoulder with a definite element of teeth.

Loki lifted his head from Pepper’s knee to fix Tony with narrowed eyes. “What are you doing?”

“Interfering with your endeavors,” Tony answered readily, trailing a hand down Loki’s chest in a way that held a lot more intention than that motion had with Pepper. “I want see how focused you can stay on her when  _I’m_ distracting  _you_.”

Loki’s expression didn’t change in any discernible way, but an amused light made its way into his eyes, dancing in the shadows between the god’s outward lust and disdain. Tony kept kissing his shoulder, following the ridge of scapula around toward the center of his back while his hand slipped lower against the skin of Loki’s abdomen, slow enough to be teasing. Pepper whined and squirmed into Loki’s motionless hand, and Tony stopped to make a tutting sound and say, “Get your head in the game, Lokes.”

Loki replied with an eloquent half-snarl and moved his hand flat to the bed. Pepper exhaled slowly through her teeth at the frustration and the loss of pressure. Loki was threading his forearms under Pepper’s thighs to support himself as he lowered his head to once again lick at her clit, but this time the motion wavered a bit when Tony’s fingers found Loki’s cock started a firm, winding pattern from base to tip.

Pepper moaned at the renewed slide of Loki’s tongue and at the unsteadiness of the touch, where his every unintentional motion shot through her with the force of knowing he’d been caught off guard, feeling Loki’s jolts of helpless arousal as her own.

Tony was stroking Loki in earnest now, mouth still kissing slowly down landmarks of his spine. He stopped to bite at one sensitive vertebra while his thumb ran along Loki’s slit, and Loki’s tongue was delving into  _Pepper_ , and he hummed what might have been a scream if not muffled by her, and the tremors of it reverberated through her blood, low frequencies and blinding light until Pepper called out on Loki’s behalf. They were losing track now of who was who, but there was beauty and screams and enmity and awe, and Tony was lost in it too, jacking himself with the same motions he was using to take Loki apart.

It was a rare thing for them to all three fall over the edge at the same time, but this time somehow it would have been difficult not to, like they pulled each other down in a tumbling heap, like whoever came first — hard to tell — crumbled the supports and sent orgasm crashing down on all of them.

When Tony could see straight again, he let himself fall sideways a little away from Loki, and kissed Pepper’s ankle when he found it conveniently in reach.

Pepper spoke, not yet breathing near evenly. “I still don’t like it.”

Loki followed Tony’s example in rolling onto his side, then nuzzled at Pepper’s inner thigh. “What we have isn’t simple,” he quoted her softly, and seemed content with that.


	12. First Time They Have Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FEELS! (Not made clear in the ficlet, but Tony and Pepper are not together.)

“I guess I won’t be seeing you again,” Tony thought about saying.

Instead, he pretended to read a safety briefing Jarvis had prepared for the Mark VIII. Twenty feet away, the floor was still dented from Loki’s attempted invasion a few weeks prior. Almost a month. Almost a month of sneaking Loki out of SHIELD custody, then sneaking him in again before he was missed. At first it was to grill him with questions about what the invasion had really been about. And once Tony was satisfied with Loki’s answers (read: the way Loki glared at Tony to indicate his guesses were correct), two weeks of sneaking Loki out to grill him with questions about Thanos, about what was really out there, and how imminent the danger was to the human race.

And once Tony was satisfied with Loki’s answers (read: not up to compiling any more data to feed his nightmares), four days of sneaking Loki out just… because.

Loki sat beside him on the couch, also not saying a great deal. Pretending to read a copy of Webster’s. Brushing up on his English vocabulary.

_Yeah, that’ll come in handy in an Asgardian prison._

Leaving tomorrow to be tried on Asgard. For now they sat side by side. Loki was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, magically constructed in a more understated imitation of Tony’s own style. There was a symbol in gold on the front of the shirt where a band logo should be. It was curvy and incomprehensible. Loki had only just started wearing T-shirts, and he wore them too well, tight against the lines of his shoulders, loose around a narrow torso, and finally draping like grecian cloth over the tilt of his hips.

Tony didn’t look at the way the black fabric bunched along the belt of Loki’s jeans. Tony was reading. He’d forgotten what he was reading, but it was definitely something.

Tony didn’t say, “Maybe just don’t go.” Because Loki  _should_  go, Loki should answer for his crimes, and because if Loki really wanted to get away he  _would_  no matter what Tony said.

And because, “Maybe just don’t go,” would sound a lot like, “I don’t want you to go.”

Tony didn’t say, “I don’t want you to go.”

He just thought about saying it.

He thought of a lot of ways of saying it.

Finally Loki closed the dictionary and set it down in the coffee table. “I’ll be missed if I don’t return soon.”

“I don’t want you to go.” Shit, he said it.

Loki froze, still leaning forward with his hand extended toward the book he’d discarded. His eyes closed slowly, shutting out Tony, shutting out a world of imaginary spectators as he went about seeking a safely out-of-the-way corner in his own mind where he could let himself consider those words.

A slow blink of an eye, and then Loki was leaning back easily into the sofa, smiling smug and just wide enough that it didn’t cover the sadness in his eyes. “I didn’t actually say I  _intended_  to return.”

“You do, though,” Tony said, sure.

Loki blinked again.

“Not sure why, but you want to go back. Maybe you’re up to something. Maybe you just want to see what they’ll do with you.”

Tony tried to catch Loki’s eye, and Loki chose that moment to gaze out the broken window. “I don’t  _want_  to go,” he corrected. “I do need to.”

“You  _need_  to know what they’ll do.”

“I’ll speak with my father. Soon enough, much will depend on the king of Asgard and his whims. I would know his mind, and for that I must be at his mercy.”

“Time to go, then.” Tony slapped his hands to his knees and stood, and Loki mirrored the motion with more grace. Tony went to step past Loki toward the door, and Loki lifted a hand indicating for him to wait, and Tony didn’t see the motion so he walked into Loki’s hand with an audible tap of arc reactor against wrist bone.

That tap, the sound and the slight frequency of in Tony’s chest, sent a wave of instinctive terror through his body that he stifled almost before it even registered on his face.

The consequence was that he was standing face to face with the god of mischief in very close quarters and his heart was pounding. He looked up at Loki, a little wide-eyed. Loki frowned down at his hand and started to withdraw it, then seemed to change his mind and rested his fingers more firmly against the circle of plastic. His eyes moved slowly back up to Tony’s face, and narrowed in question.

Tony swallowed. He could feel the indirect pressure of those fingers where reactor casing touched flesh and bone. “They’ll be missing you, you said.”

“True, but I leave _tomorrow_.” He tilted his head in mock contemplation. “Till then, I  _might_  just let them twist.”

Tony found himself taking a step backward at the implications of that. But he opened his mouth and spoke with only a little difficulty. “Jarvis, if SHIELD calls, I’m passed out drunk in Fiji.”

“Oddly specific,” Loki observed, taking the step forward that Tony had taken back. His stride was a little longer than Tony’s, so they stood closer. Tony could feel the metal of Loki’s belt buckle brushing against a spot a little below his own belly button.

“Yeah, well. ‘ _I’m not in_ ,’ didn’t go over well the first time they roped me into catching you.” Tony reached around to Loki’s low back and pulled, so that the words  _catching you_  coincided with Loki’s body being pressed more firmly against his. “And Fiji is far away. It’ll take me a while to get from  _there_  to rendezvous with SHIELD when the marks Six and Seven are out of commission.” Loki’s hands came to rest on either side of his hips, then slid slowly up, over his shirt (damn), and when Tony tilted his head up in invitation there was a very slight, cocky roll to the motion. “I’ll have to get here by plane. That’ll take  _hours_.”

Loki met the invitation and kissed him.

The god’s mouth was soft and coaxing, when Tony let himself be pulled in too deep there was just a hint of teeth, like a trap, sweet as stinging honey and bitter as a warning. The kiss was passionate and guarded, luring and pushing, Loki ripping Tony’s shirt away like it offended him, Loki going still when Tony went to remove his in turn, like he’d not quite expected it, but helping Tony easily enough once he caught on. The press of their bodies was melting Tony’s bones, hot with affection and hot with irritation, wishing Loki would stop toying with him, wishing Loki would never stop toying with him, and certain underneath it all that this wasn’t actually the game it felt like. It was something real and honest and present and almost gone.

 _Going away tomorrow_. Tony gripped Loki’s arms and pulled him closer so their bare torsos met, a needy gesture hiding under force and demand. He reached around and behind to rest his hands on the tops Loki’s shoulders so he could pretend there was something dominant in the motion when he used that leverage to grind up into the taller man.

And then there was friction and gasps that were probably coming from both of them by the way the sounds overlapped, and they both sort of lost track in a haze of taking and touching. Closer, unwrap, find, kiss, devour, grind, melt,  _closer_.

Tony wasn’t sure how they’d gotten their pants off or when they’d found their way back onto the couch and a lot more horizontal, but a strong force of habit was driving him to pause and think about the logistics of what was about to happen. The need for supplies, for one. And as he seemed to be on top with Loki’s legs winding around his waist, maybe even a need for verbal consent, considering those little hesitations earlier, the way even wanting something seemed to be a broken thing for Loki, not that he was giving any mixed messages now —  _focus_.

He forced himself to still, and Loki sent him a look both admishing and questioning.

“We need a couple things,” Tony said, taking Loki’s ankle and pulling to extract himself.

Loki refused to budge and went to bite very divertingly at Tony’s neck. “I have very convenient magic. Stop thinking.”

“Just one other — ”

Loki ground his hips up and Tony’s brain shorted out for a while more. His hand found its way into Loki’s ass, working him open and watching his eyes close and mouth fall open when Tony found a good spot. After a while Loki pulled his hand away and tugged lightly with his legs. Then the head of Tony’s cock was pressing into Loki’s ass and the god was still again, watching Tony.

“Waiting for something?” Loki inquired, and suddenly Tony wasn’t sure who had stopped first.

“Just tell me you want this.” His voice was shaking while his body made demands like  _grind, melt, closer, deeper_.

“Are you trying to humiliate me?” The calm in the god’s voice was eerie and placid, something that could have hidden pleasure at the notion, or deadly anger. Or both.

Tony shook his head. “No,” he breathed. “I’m making sure.”

Loki raised his eyebrows and gave Tony’s hips another sharp tug with his heels. “You have an incredible talent for missing the obvious.”

Tony’s head cleared a little at the acidity in Loki’s voice, and the human smirked. “I  _do_ _._  I really do. I missed how you obviously wanted to take over the world. That time you obviously wanted to kill your brother. Oh yeah, remember when you were obviously trying to crawl away to avoid getting captured and taken back to Asgard to be tried? I miss a  _lot_  of obvious things.”

“Tony.”

“Yes, oh obvious one?”

“Shut up and fuck me.” Loki started in on his neck again, mouth hot against sensitive skin, breath fanning cold over the damp trails he left.

Tony’s hips were moving of their own accord anyway by the time he managed a reply. “Fine, fine, I can take a hint…”

Loki kissed his mouth and shut him up properly while they fused together and found a rhythm of jarring impacts, both groaning helplessly and holding tight to each other wherever they could find a grip.

Loki came first, head thrown back, jaw clenched while the rest of him went slack. Tony followed a little while later, shuddering to a halt while his vision went static and everything else was touch and motion and Loki’s skin and  _closer, grind, falling, breathing_ , and the taste of stinging honey and something bitter and dark, like sleep swallowing him before he was ready. (Like losing something too soon.)

Tony floated somewhere pleasant for a long time before Loki broke the silence. “Tony.”

“Hm?” Tony prompted, mostly asleep.

“Perhaps you’d consider coming to visit me in prison.”

Stirring more awake, the inventor looked over at his (now) lover and saw guarded hope and sated lust and everything he shouldn’t have and never wanted to let go.

Loki’s suggestion was going to be risky, was going to get them in trouble. This whole thing was going to get them both hurt, probably more than it was worth.

“This is a bad idea,” Tony didn’t say.


	13. Gags

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This scene is a sequel to the prompt fill for day twelve.
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** A distinct lack of actual porn.

Tony had tried creating small, stable interdimensional rifts. He tried reconstructing the science of Asgardian magic from scratch to see what could be done to get around their shields. When none of that yielded any promising leads to get him into Loki’s cell undetected, he tried getting very drunk. In the morning he found that he’d drawn some magic-looking squiggles in conductive ink and wired them up to a potato, still to no avail.

Once he finally came up with the idea of dressing as a guard and walking right in to the dungeon, everything went pretty smoothly.

Loki was in the first cell on the left, facing away from Tony and buried in a book. He looked more composed than Tony expected, his clothes and hair neat. Gone were the gag and chains he’d worn when the Avengers had seen him off.

Loki spoke before Tony could say anything. “Let me guess: Odin sent you here to search my cell for escape plans or other contraband.”

"Um," Tony said dumbly, still behind him and trying to figure out if the god was playing some game or honestly didn’t know who he was. How  _could_  he know without looking? But Tony wasn’t about to disrupt Loki’s facade if there was one.

The god looked up at the ceiling and dropped his book against his knees in a show of exasperation. “It’s the gold button on the left wall.” As Tony pressed the button and stepped in, he continued, “I don’t know how my dear father screens recruits for you job, but I’m certain the priority is either forgetfulness or incompetence.” He stood to face Tony and grinned, unsurprised. “Ah. I see it’s both.”

"How’d you know it was me?"

"You rather stand out."

"Uh-huh. I know I’m a little short for a stormtrooper, but you were looking the other way. So."

Loki shrugged a silent  _perhaps we’ll never know_ , and Tony gave up.

"Nice place you’ve got here. I thought they’d keep you clapped in irons; good to see you weaseled your way out of that one. I was kind of hoping for some privacy though, I gotta say."

"Privacy?" Loki scoffed. "For the god of obfuscation? Then Odin might face accusations of being  _kind_. Fortunately my illusions are better than he knows. In the eyes and ears of everyone outside, you are currently searching the contents of my cell. Quite thoroughly. May take a while.”

Tony grinned and stepped forward, and Loki stepped back, opening his mouth with a slightly pained twist as if to explain something Tony may not like, but again the inventor didn’t stop quit in time, and this time his hand went through Loki’s wrist. Tony frowned and tried again to touch Loki’s hand, and found it to be not really there. “You tricked me?”

The image of Loki grimaced. “Not the way you think.”

The glow of illusion moved aside from one corner or the cell like a spotlight shifting away, to reveal the real god of mischief. Little else changed in that corner but that the book there looked more worn and the carpet more trod down. As for Loki, his hair was less well-kept, his clothes plainer, and his mouth was covered over with the same gag he’d worn on the way home from earth. He raised his eyebrows at Tony in resigned greeting.

Tony stared, then looked to Loki’s double for help. “ _Why_?”

"The illusion allows me to speak."

"Not that. Why the gag? I expected the chains to stay. Not this."

The illusion smiled sadly at him. “A mouth for the god of lies?” He took a breath. “The gag limits my magic. With gestures I can trick the eyes and ears, but I can’t really  _alter_  anything. I can’t work  _real_  spells. I can’t so much as move a chair.”

"You can’t get it off?"

"I  _will_  figure it out eventually. The guards remove it when they bring the meals, but they do so with my back turned. It’s little to go on.”

"Well, leave it to the expert." Tony crouched and grabbed Loki’s head, twisting it around and brushing Loki’s hair aside so he could get a close look at the workings of the clasp. "I’ve been trapped in metal casings more times than I can…  This has a keyhole!"

"Does it?" Loki’s illusion leaned around to see what Tony was doing, but he asked, "What does it look like?"

"So you  _can’t_  see with your back turned. Hah. Yeah, definitely a keyhole. Just a sec.” Tony searched the pockets of his stolen uniform and produced a ring of golden keys. All different shapes, so he automatically picked out the one that would fit before he really thought to look for it. “Got it.”

He pressed the key in and turned the lock, and the contraption came free with a _click_.

Loki groaned as he pulled off the gag, a sound relief and pain. His lips were wet and cracked dry both, and he licked them and cleared his throat several times before really regaining his poise. He waved his hand and the illusion disappeared. Looking down at the gag, Loki tapped his finger against the black space Tony had found, and it rang solid. “A hole that can be seen but not felt. Clever.” His real voice was rough from disuse.

Not interested in praising the workmanship of that damned gag, Tony just put a hand to Loki’s jaw and kissed at the point where the metal had left angry red marks just under the line of Loki’s cheekbone.

"I have to thank you," Loki said as Tony pulled back.

Tony bobbed his head in contemplative agreement. “You know, nothing says  _gratitude_  like sexual favors. Just how long will it take me to, um, 'search the cell'?”

Loki grinned. "Oh, it could take _hours_."


	14. Genderswap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fem!Tony AU

Loki sat back and watched Tony build while he waited for the inventor to notice her lover’s arrival. She was building a larger version of the suit, something that was more “tank” in class than her usual fare, grim and so enormous that she’d built a platform to encircle the beast while she worked at the assembly. The machine was thick and monstrous, but far from ugly or simplistic. There was sleek elegance and interlocking intelligence to the design, the occasional intricate gold joint bright against the darker scheme, reminding any opposition that their defeat was planned elegant as clockwork, equal parts with weight and iron and charging dread.

It was like Tony, if she set out to do a thing, to bring out the beauty of it. To thrill at the speed, to lean into the elegant curves. Her weapons and her armor were an art of extravagant practicality, the flair of polished edges and the density of deadly, spiralling power.

Her body was an art of extravagant practicality too, in the way she dressed it, trained it, and moved it. Years of ballet and jujutsu had made her strong and graceful — at least when she was sober. Before the press she was fashion and aristocracy and reckless seduction, dresses cut a little too low and falling a little too high. She flirted with every male body to catch her eye, often enough and shamelessly enough that the press had her sleeping with everyone, and few realized that only the really smart ones got into her bed.

Loki preferred her as she looked here, bruised and grease-covered with the build, and incandescent with her trance-like creative flow. More dirty and human. More divine. Still she held that element of reckless seduction — she never really lost it. Her shirt was a too-tight metallica T she’d bought as a teenager and outgrown. Her hair was just long enough to tie back away from her face as it was now, with a few stray locks falling forward to frame the look of focus gracing her features. A tool belt was fastened snug to her leg and hips in a way that looked both inevitable for fit and safety, and outrageously provocative in how tightly it held her work pants to her form. Loki suspected there was an element of narcissism in it, that she loved catching sight of the curve of her own ass in the odd reflective surfaces of the shop, or the agile line of her figure as she swung down from the railings she’d built up around her latest creation.

“The word ‘ostentatious’ comes to mind,” Loki commented, and Tony swore, startled, and didn’t quite drop the bottle of oil she’d been smearing on the nearest joint.

“Why do you always sneak up on me when I’m trying to build something, huh?” she demanded, turning to face him as she put the bottle down on the platform next to her and rubbed her hands clean (ish) on the rough brown material of her pants. “One of these days I’m gonna jump and break my neck and you’re gonna get stuck cleaning up afterwards. Ever think of that, Romeo?”

“When are you not trying to build something?”

“When I’m sleeping, or eating, or fighting crime,” she suggested, swinging down from the platform with practiced eased, and there it was — the line of Tony’s body in motion that never failed to draw Loki’s eyes and make him want to touch.

Considering Tony’s words, he said, “I come when you should be sleeping or eating, and yet I always find you here. And as for when you’re fighting crime…” Loki vanished and reappeared right behind her, sliding the point of one finger down her spine. “…Do you really want the likes of me sneaking up on you  _then_?” he whispered, steadily quieter as his mouth found her ear.

Well used to Loki’s tricks and not startled this time, Tony just tossed her head, twisting it to look back at him. “Touche.”

Loki kissed her mouth when it came in reach. She turned to face him and laughed into the kiss when their noses crossed awkwardly past each other, then wrapped her arms around Loki’s shoulders and pulled herself up bodily to deepen the kiss. Loki gasped at the warm weight of her body shifting up against his, and then his thoughts scattered as his focus narrowed to her mouth sliding against his, the taste of heat and coconut, as well as rum and chocolate lingering on her tongue from an earlier meal — or what she considered a meal. Loki’s hands found her hips and took a moment to pull and grind, making them both groan, then he worked at the fastenings of her tool belt, lingering teasingly on the buckle between her legs until she squirmed down against his fingers and made an urgent noise. The toolbelt hit the floor with clicks and clangs of scattering metal.

There was a padded section of flooring for flight tests that tended to involve Tony landing hard on her head, and nowadays it was used more often for encounters such as this. Loki walked them to that spot and then sat, letting Tony’s legs fold against the floor on either side of his hips so she was kneeling above him. She straightened up out of the kiss and grinned at their position. “You’re giving me top seat without a fight? That’s a change. You must really like me.” She started unbuttoning his pants, still grinning.

“Well, I’ve given you that seat, but I may not let you keep it. Although if my admiration of you is in question, Lady Stark….” She shot him a disapproving  _what are you up to_  look at the slick formality, and Loki leaned up to kiss her again. “…then it would be remiss of me not to concede the point…” He lifted his hips to help her pull down his trousers and boxers. “…that I do in fact…” Tony’s hand came to circle his cock, and Loki made a slightly high-pitched breathless noise as she pulled her work-calloused fingers along his length. Loki tried to recover, failed, tried to regain the thread of his words as her hand moved again. “…love you,” he finished, completely by accident, for all it was true.

Tony’s hand went still and her eyes went wide and questioning, and Loki just let his head fall further back and closed his eyes as he cursed himself for being every kind of idiot. “… _Damn_.”

He cursed inwardly again, realizing a moment too late that just that expletive would be enough to condemn him as having utterly meant it.

Tony’s hand started moving over him again, and the touch went through him like electricity, all the sharper and more intoxicating for how vulnerable he’d just made himself, like the salt that made water more conductive to charge — or harsher stinging on an open wound. She leaned down to kiss him as her hand moved, and she took and took, dominating the kiss until he couldn’t think. She stroked firmly, thoroughly, and he lost himself in the texture and heat of her hand, and his whole world was blood pounding against her skin. She’d never taken him with this kind of desperation. Loki was being wrecked in a storm, and he lost the last of himself to it soon enough, helpless pleasure spasming across his face as he came.

Tony knew Loki’s recovery time by now, and she rolled to the side efficiently to quickly shuck her own pants before clambering to straddle him again where he was ready and waiting for her to resume. No condom needed — At least one of the things Tony had injected into herself in the past six months was a birth control substance. She rolled her hips down smoothly and watched Loki’s face spasm with another flash of helpless pleasure at the feel of her surrounding him.

Then they were on each other again with hands and mouths, hastily tugging away shirts and one bra, and Tony was angling her hips over Loki so his upward thrusts dragged hard over just the right spot. Each beat was a groan and a blinding flash, and the sweet echo of the friction spread slowly through her body like hot molasses, rolling and dark. She found her own orgasm while his hands stroked along the outside of her thighs and his mouth worshipped her throat and breasts and circled the reactor in between, teeth grazing metal and skin. She heard a lot of “Loki”s and “Yes.  _Fuck_  yes!”s spilling from her mouth in a voice like hers but higher, a voice cracking on the soprano range when Loki took firmer hold of her hips and started to control the motions, making sure the high for her far outlasted her ability to properly coordinate their movements. It was a long time, but hard to know how long as she was lost somewhere between golden bliss and plummeting inertia, where the scales broke and magnetism blurred into gravity blurred into acceleration, the pull of opposites and weight rushing up to meet its likeness and heartbeats racing and slowing.

When she finally came down far enough to identify present things like hips and thrusts and the smell of fresh sweat, Tony shoved Loki’s hands away from her hips and pushed him flat to his back, taking back the advantage, shifting the angle again to something deeper and more direct. Less intense for her,  _drowning_  him, and Tony laughed exuberantly as she watched Loki struggle for breath. She leaned down to find his ear, spoke one soft, “C’mon love,” and heard him make a choked sound as he came a second time and they both shuddered with it. She bit lightly at his ear and some of his hair found its way into her mouth so she tasted fine black strands of silk against her tongue simultaneous with the sound of her name, “Tony,” whispered brokenly on an indrawn breath.

She liked him like this. Dirty and fallen and divine.


	15. Getting Caught Having Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** A distinct lack of actual porn yet again.

Christine Everhart walked through the upstairs hallway of the venue at the latest Stark sponsored fundraiser. She was absently looking for an out-of-the-way bathroom, and less absently looking for rich and powerful people to have a few words with if they happened to wander in the same direction. The new CEO of Hammer Tech would have made for a very nice victim in light of recent scandals, or really any of his staff.

She heard a noise and looked around to see where it was coming from.

No one in view, but there was that noise again, something like a muffled groan followed by labored breathing. Aaand it was coming from a closet, the door of which had just come free of a half-closed latch and was drifting a few inches open.

Oh.

Propriety warring with a reporter’s curiosity (and the off-chance that all that labored breathing might be something more sinister than closet sex), Christine took a few steps to the side to glance through the door.

Well,  _that_  was Tony Stark. That was Tony Stark naked, always a nice view, and it was made even more impressive by the set of long shapely limbs tangled up with his and the very explicit activities the two bodies were engaged in. And those were male legs and… other male body parts and… wow.

The first thing to cross her mind was that if she really was the first to know that Tony Stark was gay, that might just make her career, in blackmail if nothing else, and did she have a camera phone on her? This wasn’t generally quite her area; Tony Stark sleeping around was tabloid material where Christine preferred politics. Real news. But still, a photo might come in handy one way or another.

The second thought was something along the lines of  _oh my sex gods_ overlaying a vague curiosity about whether or not they’d let her join in and make this a threesome. She did love to get hands-on in her investigative reporting — depending on who she was getting her hands on, and _these_ two…

The third thing to cross her mind was the image of Loki’s face when she got a glimpse of it, with a burst of recognition and horror and the burning feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling she associated with the rare experience of having her idealism disappointed further than it already was.

Distantly noticing the tight feeling of her jaw clenching, Christine dug around in her purse for that camera phone, and lifted it to take a picture.

“You really don’t want to do that,” a cool british-ish voice warned. The two men had paused in their activities to look up at her, Stark with his eyes wide, the god’s eyes narrowed and threatening.

Still reckless with low-burning anger, Christine tapped the screen and watched the camera’s flash light up the tableau of naked limbs before her as her phone took the picture and instantly saved it to an online drive.

She was pretty unsurprised when the phone spontaneously ground itself into powder a moment later and drifted to the floor. She just brushed her hand free of silicates on her skirt and glared. “Hello again, Tony. Care to introduce me to your friend?”

“Ah, Loki, this is, um…” Tony looked at her searchingly. “…Christie?” he guessed, looking pained. He was still very much out of breath and still kind of… inside the other man.

She addressed Loki, completely ignoring the compromising nature of his position. “Christine Everhart, Vanity Fair.”

“I was close!”

Loki didn’t greet her. “Stark, I had no idea your ineptitude spanned all the way into the realm of closing closet doors. Really, you never cease to impress me.”

Tony sent him a plaintive look. “Why do you cut me down like that in front of other people? You  _know_ how much it turns me on.” He looked at Christine, who crossed her arms expectantly. “Give us a minute.”

She closed the closet door and stepped across the hall to wait while the two public figures composed themselves. A minute passed, the door opened, and Tony Stark walked out, looking impressively composed.

No one followed.

“Where’s Loki?”

Tony looked around, then opened his mouth for a moment as he thought up an answer. “Oh, uh, that wasn’t  _Loki_. You must be mistaken.”

“I know what I saw.”

“You saw wrong.”

“Then where’s the man who was with you?”

“He left before me.”

“I was watching the door.”

“You must have looked away.”

“Care to explain what happened to my cellphone?”

“Spontaneous combustion,” Tony answered immediately with a small, resolute nod.

“You’re really gonna go with that.”

“Happens with the knockoff models. Should’ve gone with Stark tech.”

“You do realize none of this is going to blow over? I have backups of that photograph. And I think the world will be very curious to know why Tony Stark is getting into bed with the man who led the attack on Manhattan.”

“Well it’s not a bed, it’s a closet…  _but_ , I see your point.”

“ _Anything_  to say for yourself?”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, I've lost a lot of sleep over this.”


	16. Latex/Leather

Tony had enjoyed learning to ride horseback as a child. It was a new physical skill to master, it was dangerous and fast and he could feel the wind in his face. But it was one of those fields he consumed like a meal and then moved on once he knew the range of his capabilities. Horses were unwieldy and unpredictable, you couldn’t tell them what they were doing wrong and you couldn’t fix a broken one. They hadn’t held his attention long.

The first time he saw Loki on horseback, Tony concluded that equestrianism was his new favorite hobby.

They were on a visit to Asgard, and the princes were heading off on some traditional hunt that would somehow cement Loki’s return to grace in the eyes of the court. Loki mounted his horse, falling naturally into a princely posture as he found his seat in the saddle and ran his fingers unconsciously over the reins to get a sense of their length and give. And he smiled a bit, as he sometimes did while working a spell, like a man coming into his own, coming home by stepping into the familiar paths of a mastered skill that he now seldom used. There was a boyishness about that look, and certainly Loki must have been a boy most of the times he’d been out riding.

Tony’s heart did a twisty thing, seeing some of the cares drop away from Loki’s face as the god tugged harder at the reins, gently coaxing his horse to turn and face the path ahead.

So a few days later Tony suggested they go riding together, and Loki agreed with an intrigued quirk of his eyebrows and a rare hint of enthusiasm that all left Tony feeling sort of tingly.

Tony got back into the jive of horseback riding quickly as he had hoped. The pommel and canter were higher than he was used to, but that actually made him a little less worried about losing his seat — and less cautious in turn, and once they got out of the city and into the fields he left the path and tried a few jumps over low fences.

“You can actually ride,” Loki observed, watching him.

“What did you think?”

“I’ve never seen a horse on modernday earth. I thought they’d gone out of use.”

“They have. Mostly.” Tony pulled up next to Loki again at a walking gait.  The air closer around them was rich with the smells of horses and leather tack — saddle soap and a scent reminiscent of oak. “It’s all a question of who can afford the luxury of living in the past.”

Loki smiled a little sadly at that, and looked around at the summer fields. This was Loki’s past they were in right now, and Tony could sense the mix of contentment and unease that brought out in the prince. The smells of earth and grass, just sweet enough to be alien to Tony, must breath a little more bitter and comfortable for a man who’d spent his childhood riding these fields.

Maybe, though, Tony could help Loki make some new memories. Cross the gulf that distanced the man Loki had become from the earth his younger self had walked. “Race you to that tree,” Tony offered.

Loki followed his gesture and picked out the tree few hundred yards away. “And what do I get when I win?”

“You’re really cocky, you know that? When we get there, we take a little… _break_  from horseback riding. Winner gets to top.”

“Well then,” Loki said, and immediately started for the tree.

Tony swore and started after him a split second late. It was enough of a lead that with Loki’s superior riding experience, Tony really had no chance. And honestly, Loki would have won anyway, as his lead only grew for the length of the race.

Still. “You are _such_  a cheater,” Tony accused when they both brought their horses to a halt.

“You never set any rules for me to break.”

“You didn’t give me a chance!”

“Yes, well, that does tend to be the trick. And I wanted to  _win_ ,” Loki added with a dark, pointed look that made Tony swallow and offer up a one-handed shrug that yielded the argument.

Loki’s grin was only a little menacing as he swung neatly down to the ground and started detaching the reins from his horse’s bit. Tony’s legs were already a little unsteady just from the  _looks_  Loki was shooting him, but he pulled himself together, leaned into one stirrup and stepped carefully down from his horse.

Loki convinced Tony’s horse to step up into his reach with a word and gesture. When he had a hold on both horses’ bridles, he whispered a few more words to them and they turned and ran for their stables.

“Are we going to need those to get home later?” Tony asked lightly.

“They’ll return when I call,” Loki informed him smoothly, taking Tony’s hand and leading him toward the tree that had been the endpoint of their race. Then Loki backed him up against the trunk and kissed him roughly. He soon eased off the pressure but not the intent, soft enough to melt bone but aggressive and dominating all the same. His hands were all over Tony, like he was laying claim to his prize, and Tony had no complaints at all about that notion, running his hands all over Loki in turn and assisting in the mutual removing of all and various items of clothing.

Once they were both naked, Loki took hold of Tony’s forearms and pushed them high up against the bark, and it was only when Loki was tying Tony’s wrists to a low branch that was conveniently within Loki’s reach that Tony fully processed that Loki still had the reins the god had taken off his horse. “Good idea,” Tony said into the kiss, and it got a bit garbled but Loki took his meaning with ease and hummed an agreement, the sound almost content in contrast with obvious the drive and possessiveness of his mood.

Then Loki pulled up Tony’s leg to hook against his own hip, and Tony got with program and lifted his other leg to wrap around Loki’s bare waist, enjoying the planes and angles of Loki’s hips between his thighs and calves. Most of his attention, though, was being caught and held by Loki’s mouth, firm and biting against his, and Loki’s fingers efficiently working him open.

When Loki pushed into him, it was with more force than usual, a little too much a little to soon, so Tony felt the burn of being really taken, and that was hot in itself, how acutely he could feel Loki inside him, how desperate and not-quite-cruel the god was in pressing close to him and pressing the advantage of Tony’s bound hands. The harshness of this wasn’t quite what Tony had expected, not here, but he realized that Loki had caught onto his intentions, and this was the inevitable result. This was about making this place home to the man Loki had become, and, in part, the man he’d only recently discovered he had always been.

That meant a home to that darkness and that edge, the brutality that had carried him through the worst of his hells, as much the tenderness and connection that now carried him through the ramifications of his brutality. It was all juxtaposed, all real. Need and trust and rough trusts and sharp teeth on Tony’s collarbone. Force and desperation and soft kisses warm against his neck.

Tony was heaving gasps of air that smelled like sweat and dirt, and still that hint of saddlesoap and oak. His cock was pressed tight between their bodies, skin and muscle shifting with exertion and the desperate pull for air on both their parts. And that was almost enough friction but not quite, and he was jerking with a distinct lack of leverage just trying to get that little more, the firmer slide of skin that he needed.

He sagged with relief when he finally felt Loki’s hand on him, arms giving up the struggle for leverage as those gorgeous, long fingers wrapping deftly around him and started pumping in time to the sharper pleasure flooding his body with each of Loki’s thrusts.

Loki’s face was even with his, eyes dark with arousal boring into him, and Tony was full and broken and taken by this man, unpredictable and unwieldy, broken beyond fixing.  _Perfect_ , Tony thought, and then said the word aloud on a weak exhale as he stared to come. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wrack through him, hot and rough and good as Loki rode him through it.

The heat turned to burning for a minute as Loki kept going, taking just a little longer to reach that edge, and Tony was far too blissed out to mind, and with his hands still tied there was very little he could do but groan Loki’s name until Loki groaned back and shuddered and came into him with a rush of heat and a few more unsteady thrusts.

Loki pulled the knots free and let Tony’s arms fall, and which point they both sort of knelt and leaned into each other, resting heads and on shoulders and breathing through the ache and elation as it settled through them. “I think I like visiting your home,” Tony heard himself say, one of those random observations his mouth liked to make up when his head busy doing other things.

“You're not visiting,” Loki murmured weakly, and took an unsteady breath before finishing, “You are my home.”


	17. Masturbation

As daring and selfish as Loki could be, he wasn’t one to assume he was welcome. He wasn’t one to assume he was wanted, and he didn’t trust easily.

It was because of that, really, that Tony always felt that warm, aching tightness in his chest when he found that Loki had come to his home while he was out. It was a rare occasion. Twice before now Tony had come home to find Loki already there, seeking refuge instead of sex, his condition always some mix of burnt or bloodied or temporarily rendered unable to work spells.

After that they didn’t speak of it, but the unspoken status was changed, in what Loki had needed and what Tony had given: Loki could come to him for help without warning or invitation. It was trust offered by both, and taken by each with all the unease of man trusting his own feet in an earthquake, mostly for lack of better alternatives.

Tonight Tony arrived home after a long day and was surprised to find Loki asleep in his bed. And his chest,  _yup_ , filled with that constricting heat, like the pins-and-needles of oncoming tears but lower, the terrifying sensation of being  _given_  trust. It was like having lava poured into his cupped hands, but somehow with Loki he was always greedy for more of it.

Splayed out on Tony’s bed, Loki looked intact, uninjured but utterly exhausted. There were dark circles under his eyes, bringing his complexion from pale to sickly, and the discarded Asgardian armor that littered the floor next to the bed just screamed  _lack of magic_.

Loki had stipped down to the light cloth pants and loosely woven shirt he wore under all that metal and leather, and he lay, back atop the covers, like a thing dead. Except for the rise and fall of soft, even breathing.

Tony stared for a while, just taking in the warmth and the unease he felt, and the beauty of Loki’s form, before he shook his head and went off to change for bed himself. While he was brushing his teeth, Tony thought to ask Jarvis how long the god had been dead to the world, and found that Loki had arrived and crashed early this morning, shortly after Tony left for the errands of the day. Tony crawled into bed next to Loki and slept.

A couple hours later Tony woke from a light doze to a sound from the man next to him, a noise vocal and quiet but somehow very difficult to ignore. Loki had obviously moved into a different phase of sleep, because his breath was quickening and his hips were shifting, just the slight undulations of a man seeking friction against a nonexistent surface that _should_  be  _right there_  according to whatever scenario his mind was constructing.

Tony woke quickly as he registered Loki’s state, and stared, wide eyed, as Loki’s hand inched toward his crotch and his mouth fell open with quicker and more and more desperate breath. Tony jerked at the sound of his own name, “ _Tony_ ,” and his own cock twitched and hardened a little further, now almost completely ready for anything he might like to do with the sleeping, squirming, groaning god who was lying here in  _Tony’s_  bed saying _Tony’s_  name and being every kind of tempting.

Tony pushed back the covers and started to roll toward him, then stilled suddenly, not letting himself move closer.

He scrubbed a hand over his face and heaved a frustrated breath as he reconsidered. It wasn’t a question of ethics; he’d woken to find himself in middle of some unspeakably fun activities with the god of chaos a number of times, and turnabout was fair play. But some instinct told Tony  _not tonight_ , that Loki was helpless with more than sleep just now, and that the pressure of real touch might shift him too easily into the realm of nightmares.

Tony sighed again, and groaned at the unfairness of it all when Loki started to stroke himself in his sleep, making satisfied and needy noises. A few more garbled, “ _Tony_ ”s cropped up here and there and just…  _fuck_.

Tony spat in his hand and started stroking his own cock, releasing some of the tension built up from just watching Loki, and feeling the heat of that pleasure scattering low in his belly. That was better, but not enough. It was all Tony could do not to touch the man next to him. The silhouette of Loki’s face was sharp in the darkness, one gray against another. Tony’s eyes followed that line, the curve of his lips and chin and the edge of Loki’s neck, shifting with the choked noises he made, rolling when he swallowed.

Tony found that he was inching closer unconsciously, nearing Loki but not touching, and the fingers of his free hand jerked and curled as he fought the impulse to reach just that little bit closer, to get his fingers on skin, to feel first hand the sharp, rolling motions of the body next to him.

Both their hands were moving faster now, and Loki made low sound in his throat, a growl really, followed abruptly by a much higher sound as his features contorted with pleasure. “ _Tony_ —”

“— _Loki_!” Tony came with a shudder, and so did Loki at just about the same time. (Which Tony found tragic on one level because why couldn’t that happen more often when they were  _actually fucking_?) But in this moment it was right, inevitable somehow. Like they’d been synched up when seeing Loki lying here had burned through Tony’s chest earlier that evening. The feeling snapped between them like electricity on a wire, or lightning followed by a rolling thunder in the slide of endorphins rushing through Tony’s bloodstream.

They were both breathing heavy and loud. Loki hadn’t woken and Tony was falling back toward sleep. Still, he didn’t touch. Even with the tension broken, he didn’t assume he wouldn’t be a catalyst for Loki’s own mind to start torturing him, as was so often its habit. As daring and selfish as Tony could be, he didn’t assume.


	18. Medical Play

Tony sat up on his bed while Loki took stock of the injuries he’d sustained during his last battle. All flesh wounds, none immediately dangerous but some quite deep.

They were only just starting to admit to themselves that something powerful lay between them. Letting themselves admit to worry if the other got hurt, relief when the other came back safe, longing when they parted. Of course they didn’t talk about those things to each other —  _god forbid_  — but it was there, it was starting, it was in looks and touches. And the way Loki looked at Tony’s injuries like they personally offended him… well, it was endearing, Tony admitted to himself with an effort of self-directed honesty that was only just becoming familiar.

Finally Loki touched Tony’s arm and whispered in the unintelligible language of magic. Tony let out a harsh breath of surprise — not pain — at the sensation that spread out from Loki’s hand. Not quite pins and needles, and less so as his body adjusted, he could feel it winding through him, knitting his wounds together with a deft exactness. “Is that your magic I feel?”

Loki frowned, genuinely surprised. “ _That_  would be a first. But I’ve never healed a mortal before. You could be more sensitive to it,” he allowed.

“I’m pretty sure that’s your magic I feel,” Tony concluded and then let his head fall back because… wow, this was new. Not pins and needles, but more a frequency like a low hum, twisted like a hard puzzle, stinging with an oddly metallic burn of healing.

Then it all stopped, the magic vanishing from his system, and the strange feelings evaporating with it.

“That’s all your injuries,” Loki concluded.

“Nnn _no_ , it’s not!” Tony argued plaintively.

Loki’s eyes narrowed, a little suspicious that Tony was hurt more than he’d let on, far more suspicious that he was attempting a particularly pathetic lie. Which he totally was.

“I think I should take off my shirt so you can really do the job properly,” Tony added, already doing so. Loki titled his head contemplatively as he considered Tony’s — very intact — naked torso. Tony leaned back on his arms so the muscles over his stomach and sides stood out a little with effort to take his weight, and shifted his hips to sit at a bit of an angle, positioning his frame in a blatant attempt to lure the god closer.

And it worked. Loki crawled forward to leaned over him, eyes still roving over Tony’s figure. “Oh, I see the problem. Something  _clearly_ needs to be done here.”

“I’m glad you’re aware of the immediacy of the problem,” Tony said evenly, angling his head to posture for a kiss now the god was in proximity for one, but not taking it, then lightly leaning back again, playing with the draw that was pulling them together.

Loki met Tony’s eyes and quirked his mouth in light amusement at the game of it, then looked down as he placed a hand flat to Tony’s chest below the reactor. “Is this where it hurts?”

Tony pressed his lip together and glanced at the ceiling in mock thought. “There and a little lower.”

The magic started up again, and Tony’s eyes fell shut, liking the feeling more the more he adjusted to it. The magic pooled at the center of him just under Loki’s hand and washed out through his whole body, still with that metallic sting and a weaving cleverness, grasp and insight, like the spell was exploring every bond and helix of his makeup, the better to knit him together or twist him apart. Tony’s arms felt weak under him, his jeans felt tight over his crotch, and he’d never been this worked up and lost from being touched so little.

Loki trailed his hand down to the skin just above the button of Tony’s pants. He stopped there to trace little circles in that spot and changed the spell a touch. The burn of healing disappeared from its flavor, shifting over to something smoother, something addictively bitter that slid through him, reminiscent of good coffee and cool liquor. “How does that feel?” Loki asked.

Tony whimpered and tried to remember how to form words.

“That good?” Loki sounded surprised and very pleased, and it just added insult to imaginary injury how Loki’s voice slid through Tony’s awareness with the same flavor of this all-wrecking spell, good coffee and cool liquor, grasp and insight.

Tony made an affirmative noise and leaned back further, resting his back against the mattress preemptively before his arms really did give out. He felt sluggish as well as sharply aroused, like Loki’s touches were coming to him through a haze, but everything was amplified, and those fingers circling very low on his abdomen could very well be the only thing in the universe, and enough sensation to fill and overpower one damned expansive universe.

He heard Loki chuckle and Tony felt himself shaking at just the pleasure of that sound vibrating over him, a lower rhythm only slightly dissonant with the humming frequency of the magic itself. Then those fingers were twisting down to unbutton the top of Tony’s pants, and Tony was struck by the brief nonsense thought that Loki was going to continue from there and unmake his whole body, unfasten ligament from bone and untangle every thread of folded protein, making good on every last scrap of knowledge that spell had gathered in picking through the smallest details of his makeup, and Tony wasn’t sure he would have a word of objection to give, if Loki wanted to destroy him as attentively as all that. He certainly hadn’t recovered the ability to put together words of any kind, unless groaning something that was almost but not quite managing to be Loki’s name over and over again could be counted as articulation.

Then Tony’s cock was finally free of his jeans and Loki’s hand was sliding up along the shaft and Tony was so far gone by now that that was really all it took. Tony came hard all over Loki’s hand, felt a soreness in his throat, prompting him to notice the sound of his own voice calling out harshly, and the only thing he could think while he was plummeting through orgasm and ecstasy was that he had been right, he was pretty sure he was being unraveled down to the folds of his proteins and it was all Loki’s fault, and he was so okay with that.

Loki’s hands left him, letting Tony recover and float up through haze and bliss, breathing hard.

“Wow,” Tony said at length. He turned his head and looked at Loki, gearing up to make some “my god” crack or maybe something about magic hands, but jokes and pillow talk fell away when he looked at Loki. The god was still hard, not having fucked Tony, not having taken care of himself, having given and not taken in any way. And the implications of that made Tony swallow, or maybe it was more the way Loki was looking at him now, contentedly, like nothing more was needed, Tony’s pleasure was satisfying to Loki in its own right. And Tony, exhausted and sated, wasn’t satisfied, needed make Loki come after him and the implications of  _that_ …. It was there, it was starting.

It was really fucking endearing.


	19. Oral Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is very self-referential and should give you a sense of what I thought was involved in writing good smut like a year ago...

Tony felt as if a thousand words could be used just to describe how good this blowjob was.

Give or take.

They should be good words, elegant and pleasurable like the god currently kneeling in front of him. He’d have to describe Loki, the way he looked, the silhouette of his naked shoulders bright against dark floor behind him, shoulderblades standing out when he rested his weight a little further forward on the hands with which he gripped the seat of Tony’s chair. A few strands of dark hair fell forward with the tilt and motion of his head.

Tony would need words for the faint smells of metal and leather, soap and sweat, all bringing back recollections of similar moments, repetition reinforcing intensity where the knowledge of what Loki could do to him had been brought home so many times that just the smell of Loki’s skin was enough to make Tony feel wanting and a little exposed.

And that was to say nothing of touch, because Loki’s mouth was very much on his cock, and it was earning words like  _warm_ and  _deft_  and  _wet_  and  _earth-shattering_. And then sound. There were sounds coming out of Tony’s mouth and they were pretty embarrassing, not that he cared, but he groaned and swore encouragingly when Loki tilted his head and used his teeth oh so gently, just a shadow of a bite quickly soothed over with lips and tongue. Then Loki licked flat along the underside in a long, rolling motion and Tony whimpered and that made Loki chuckle, amusement made noise made vibration, and Tony was pretty sure part of his brain shorted out from the sensation that hummed through him in echo.

Next in the senses came taste, or maybe just the way Tony’s mouth went dry when Loki tried that last maneuver again, repetition reinforcing intensity. Maybe there should be moments where the prose was interrupted — oh god — by the exclamatory sentence structure of his own scattered thoughts.

No quotation marks or reliable italics, because that would imply there was order to this, that the lines were still in place and the boundary between one thought and another could be counted on when everything was falling apart. And how could a guy keep anything set aside for designating thought as separate from prose when  _fuck_ , Loki do that again, _please_.

There should be long paragraphs. Paragraphs he could get lost in, that would make time seem to slow to a halt, that would lull him into a leisurely kind of trance, winding through expansive metaphors about being lost at sea, about hidden currents and the pull of undertow when Loki moved back and hollowed his cheeks. About Loki swallowing him down and then dragging back, like a tide coming in, a little closer to drowning him every time, with the occasional eddying  _twist_  just to make Tony whimper and jerk. Intensity reinforced by repetition, made enticing by alteration. And just as Tony got close and the wave was about to break, Loki pulled back to tease, freeing his mouth to lick a trail down one side of Tony’s length and moves his hands to Tony’s hips to hold him in place while he mouthed his way back up, torturously slow while Tony gasped and squirmed and started to beg, barely making sense of his own words as they filled his ears because pleasure and yearning frustration were rippling out through his whole body, outward from skin under Loki’s mouth. He would need a long paragraph for this, alright. No gap, no space to breathe, no landmarks to orient. The words would just go on until even the scraps of time it took to pick the beginning of each new line among that endless wall of text became part of the trance, a few extra drops of moment ebbing seamlessly into an ocean of desperate, breathless pause.

Finally, Loki showed mercy and wrapped his mouth around Tony’s dick again, tongue dragging hot over the head. Tony started coming, and hey, if there was ever a time for metaphor it was right now, because saying that he shook and groaned and it felt amazing just didn’t begin to cover it. He’d need something from an obscure but potent area of study to do justice to the intricacy and genius and forceful directness of what Loki was doing to him.

He could draw on physics, on reeling momentum and plummeting gravity, on event horizons that stretched out time and matter, on quantum theories and the scale at which chaos and probability became the only sure rules of the universe. Or he could draw on neurobiology, on wild bursts of neurotransmitters, and the undulating waves of charged salt particles rushing past each other, the boundaries of his very cells turning abruptly permeable with the physical electric rush of thought.

Or maybe he could just draw on death, on being burnt alive or torn apart, subjected defenseless to a blizzard or a maelstrom or a fall from a gut-twisting height. Anything that would cross that morbid line and bring an abrupt end to the life of a human body. To communicate that one moment of contorted perception when Tony had to honestly wonder if pleasure would kill him, and he couldn’t quite remember how dying of this might be bad.

And maybe some broken language, as he sighed Loki’s name and the rules scattered further still. The jagged interconnectivity of sentence fragments, where all was noun phrases and subordinate clauses.

Then there was  _breath_  and  _bliss_ , and other words to do with happiness and settling. A different kind of pause, beyond confusion and gasping need.

Brevity for certainty. Tony knew exactly where he was.

He could feel the air cool in his lungs, and Loki’s head resting against his leg and green eyes watching him to hungrily take in the last of his reactions, and the frame and coarse fabric of the chair under him, acute and solid.

Spaces and distinct shapes. Anchorage and re-orientation.

“I take you enjoyed that?” Loki observed a little dryly, with undercurrents of warmth and satisfaction in his voice as well as, again, hunger.

The only reply the inventor gave was a helplessly expelled breath full of broken, inarticulate awe.

Tony felt as if a thousand words could be used just to describe how good that blowjob was.

Give or take.


	20. Out-of-Character Clothing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Mentions of torture and imprisonment, and yet another lack of porn.
> 
> Also this wants for a sequel it will never have.

Loki sat in a small hotel room in California and carefully aligned the wires on his left gauntlet and retrieved his screwdriver to tighten the pin holding them down.  The TV played an unfortunate sitcom in the background, as he was too absorbed in his work to change the channel. Once the pin was in place, he reattached the power cord and tried to charge the repulsor. It flickered pathetically and went out.

Loki detached the chord and opened the pin again to test the wires one by one, a process that would once have taken an instant and a simple spell. He’d been living without magic for seven months now.

Seven months without magic, and seven months without Tony.

SHIELD had been clever about it when they finally caught onto the torrid affair between the hero and the villain. They hadn’t let on, they had used Tony to get to Loki, and when all was said and done Loki was stipped of his magic at Odin’s hand and Tony was behind bars at the hands of his own closest allies. Loki had escaped with only himself, a few pieces of Tony’s suit, and a thirst for revenge that grew like a descending winter. Creeping cold and plans as sharp and intricate as crystallizing water.

The first of those plans was to break Tony out of confinement. Obviously.

By day, Loki was a con man. If anyone asked, he worked in sales, but what he really did was a slightly more honest brand of swindling. The sort you could really go to prison for. By night, he was a student of mechanical engineering. Without magic, what remained of Tony’s suit was the closest he was going to get to supernatural abilities, so fixing it became his obsession. Both a distraction from his problems and, ultimately, a means to solve them.

He had escaped with a left gauntlet from the elbow down, a right boot up to the knee, an arc reactor imbedded in an unsalvageable chest piece, and a right shoulder guard. The shoulder piece, he had modified to house the reactor. He’d removed the repulsor from the boot to make the sole low enough to walk smoothly alongside a leather counterpart. The spare repulsor, he’d packed into the shoulder alongside the arc reactor, a hidden weapon. He should have traded for the one in the gauntlet though, because that one insisted on glitching. Not actually a feasible solution, as Loki was certain the problem was in the wiring.

His plans moved slowly without the assistance of magic, but move they did, and with a lot of craft and bribery and a little blackmail, Loki had finally managed to get a copy of Tony’s prison file. He’d looked it over earlier this evening, and the story it told wasn’t pretty.

Solitary confinement. Illegal in most developed countries for its insidious tendency to cause brain damage, incite violence, and worsen any mental illness present in humans subjected to it. For some reason still practiced widely in the US, and particularly Tony’s home state. Applying that punishment to  Tony Stark, mad and tortured and easily bored, was a level of cruelty even his tormentors in Afghanistan had not the perversity to imagine up.

Predictably, Tony’s behavior had become more erratic and more self-destructive, and at the prompting of good lawyers he’d eventually been moved to a mental health facility. Theoretically a kindness, but it changed a time-limited prison sentence to an indefinite hospitalization.

It was with horror and satisfaction both that Loki had read the list of violations with which Tony had earned his punishments. Verbal abuse of guards, refusal to obey orders, persistent hoarding of creative hand-made weapons, assault, incitement to riot… yes, that was certainly Tony Stark.

Loki plugged in the power cord again, charged the repulsor, and hit the a TV with burst of energy and loud, satisfying crunch, ending an episode of “The Goldbergs” in true style.

Loki smiled. Another week, at most, before everything would be in place to break Tony out of the hospital. The plans and the parts were coming together, all perfectly aligned.


	21. Bonus Ficlet 1: Killer Soulmates

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus material because I filled two prompts for chapter eight.
> 
> spiderjockey on tumblr made a post suggesting a soulmate AU where only your soulmate can kill you. Naturally I saw it and became obsessed with the notion of Tony and Loki falling in love and then becoming slowly more paranoid over the years. I wrote a ficlet, and then I wrote a sequel, both below.
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Domestic violence and power dynamics.

Loki was washing the dishes while Tony dried them. Forks and knives and broken plates were all things that could kill a human but not an Asgardian, Tony noted as he scrubbed a towel over the flat white porcelain of the dinnerware.

“How go the designs, Love?” Loki asked conversationally. “You were shut up in that lab of yours all day until dinner.”

“Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that. Some killer new projects in the wings. I’ll show you sometime,” Tony promised.

He’d been working all day on a field to encompass the house that would turn Loki’s magic against him. But he couldn’t very well just leave the thing turned on, because Loki used magic for all sorts of things, and that would be really awkward conversation to stop and have, say, in the middle of sex. Switching the field on at the wrong moment could easily become the  _cause_ of Tony’s death. No point starting a war. It was just that when war did break out in this house, he intended to end it very, very quickly.

He’d have to design some remote control for the device, and soon. Maybe an implant? Something gesture controlled.

“We should have Steve and the gang over more often,” Tony added.

“I might have to put up more wards if Barton keeps bringing along his bow and quiver.”

“Gotta admire paranoia like that.”

“Oh, I  _do_.”

Tony smirked. He knew more about magic by now than he ever let on to his lover, and he knew that some of the wards Loki had been placing around the house of late “to keep us both safe” would turn against Tony the minute their caster willed it. But he had plenty of surprises for Loki.

Assuming Loki knew nearly as little about engineering as he pretended. But Tony didn’t trust that. Loki was too much like him. And he was too much like Loki. Both too stubborn to go down without a fight.

It was just as Toy finished putting away the last dish that Loki took him by surprise and spun to back him against the opposite wall, with Tony’s left wrist pinned between his back and the drywall. “I’ve missed you today,” Loki informed him.

Tony grinned invitingly. “Babe, I worked all day but I never stopped thinking of you.”

“And I do appreciate the thought.” Loki’s palm came to rest lightly over the front of Tony’s neck, not overtly a threatening gesture, and Tony shivered as the god’s thumb traced slowly down the edge of his jaw. The watch on Tony’s left wrist had enough power stored for one repulsor blast, a plan to buy him time to summon his suit if he needed it. But it wasn’t angled just now the knock Loki away, and there was some hint of triumph in Loki’s face that made Tony realize that Loki knew that, had puzzled out one of his backup plans and positioned him accordingly.

Shit. If it happened  _now_ , he was in trouble. He could die so easily like this, and his heartbeat stuttered into a faster gear as Loki leaned in, pressed a thigh lightly between Tony’s legs and applied friction such that Tony’s next breath came out as an unintended, broken hum. Some of his fear made it out into the sound, betraying him, and the triumph in Loki’s expression blossomed out into a full smile, wild and bitter and forcing Tony to recall why he’d fallen so hard for this man in the first place.

Loki pressed the advantage, but only by keeping Tony pinned there and making him slowly fall apart, with more friction and more teasing thumb strokes, with those considering looks that weighed Tony’s life on a knife-edge as he groaned and writhed under the stimulation, feeling far too exposed, feeling raw enough to break and stubborn enough to try and worm his hand free from the wall. Loki  _would so_  kill him like this, just shy of coming. The bastard would find it poetic.

Loki’s hand came up to wrap around Tony’s arm just above the elbow, quelling his struggle under the guise of light, affectionate sweeps of his fingers over the sensitive skin there, setting off another round of shivers and a strangled noise as Tony almost fell over the edge, and didn’t quite.

Loki leaned in to whisper in his ear. “Tony, my love. You are my most beautiful weakness. My perfect match.” So much irony in that voice, yet so much weight. Words meant to mock, but part of Tony still believed to the core in the sincerity laced through the trickster’s voice like poison, and contradiction struck with wrecking grace. “How  _will_  I ever live without you?” Loki added with a grin in his voice and one final grind, and Tony heard himself cry out as he came, pleasure and fear briefly fused by heat and pressure and blinding light.

Tony gasped as he came down, finding that his head had fallen forward onto Loki’s shoulder and the god had let up so his arm fell free. He was alive, then. And maybe Loki really —

—  _really_  hadn’t known for certain that Tony didn’t have some other trick up sleeve. And that was smart of him, to be so cautious, because given another day, Tony  _would_  have another trick waiting. Loki knew him so, so well, but then this one act of overcaution, of not killing Tony just now when he’d had the chance, that would cost him a huge advantage in the long run.

Once Tony recovered enough of his breath, he looked up at his lover and smiled, and reached his left hand down Loki’s pants to wrap tight around the erection he found there, earning a jerk and a gasp and a wide-eyed look as Loki realized that Tony’s weaponized watch was now positioned close against his hip.

Both too stubborn to go down without a fight. The question remained: Which of them would go down  _with_  a fight?

 

* * *

 

Tony struggled to catch his breath, huddling behind the kitchen door frame and frantically working to get the repulsor on his gauntlet up and running again, listening intently to the sound of Loki in the other room tearing off strips of clothing to bandage his godly wounds. Loki had managed to take out the main bodies of all Tony’s suits early on, and he was getting by on what bits and pieces he could kludge together as he went. The anti-magic field was well in place as of three hours ago, but no telling how long it would be until the god found a way to reverse it.

"Tired yet, Lokes?" Tony called out as he worked.

"You always did know how to tire me out, love." Loki’s reply had a gratifying trace of a wheeze to it, like he’d taken an abdominal or thoracic injury he couldn’t well shake off. "Impressive, for a mortal. Or so I always thought."

"Awe, did I stop impressing you, babe?" Tony smiled to himself as he smacked a metal latch into place, lining up the mechanism well enough for at least three more good blasts.

"Never," Loki swore, and he sounded oddly solemn, but there was only so much Tony could tell without seeing Loki’s face or hearing his voice clear of pain and exertion.

If Tony got three good blasts to Loki’s head in quick succession, he could knock him unconscious long enough to track down those laser cutters and have a coup de grace ready for Loki when he woke up. How to get a clear shot, though?

Tony swallowed tightly and went out on a limb. “Hey Loki, remember our first Christmas?”

There was a sigh from somewhere in the living room. “You gave me a collection of Shakespeare DVDs, and those boots I’m fond of.”

"You gave me that iron spacial reasoning puzzle that changes shape every day. I never did solve that, you know?"

"I know. You still try sometimes."

"And on boxing day you tricked Steve into thinking his new kindle was haunted."

"You helped."

"We were on the same side then," Tony observed. "When did that change?"

There was silence.

Tony had heard enough of Loki’s voice by now to have a good sense of Aesir’s location in the room. He took advantage of the thoughtful moment to stand abruptly and come out shooting, catching Loki on the side of the head and knocking him flat. Loki rolled behind the couch before Tony could get off a second shot, and there was scorched shadow on the wall behind, indicating Tony had only partly hit his mark. But by the way Loki groaned and stumbled, that part of the blast that hit him had left a dent.

Tony followed and Loki swung out a foot to trip him up. There was a scramble, a retreat, a tangle of limbs, and then a painful pressure and a hard wall at Tony’s back.

Loki had him up against the wall, hand wrapped around his throat again, but this time it was for real, the intent was clear. Loki’s hand was strong enough to snap Tony’s neck with one concerted push, but maybe not before Tony could shoot off the repulsor he held to Loki’s eye at nearly point-blank range.

That moment stretched on while Tony waited for the shot to charge and waited for his hyoid bone to crunch under Loki’s grip.

Then the repulsor was charged, and Tony realized this was  _it_. And this range, he might not even need the coup de grace. The blast might be enough to end Loki’s life, to finally make him safe.

He could win this.

Tony didn’t move.

Loki took his eyes off Tony’s face to look slowly at the weapon where it glowed, fully charged, inches in front of him. He otherwise stayed just as still as Tony while his eyes moved back to stare intently at his human mate. “We seem to be evenly matched.”

Tony could barely speak past the hand on his throat, but he managed to spit a weak, “No kidding.”

"I should wish you farewell, then. Whoever moves  _first_  survives alone. All that planning, and it comes down to a simple test of will.”

Pushing down on Loki’s hand to gain another precious millimeter to breath, Tony pulled in air enough to growl, “ _I’m_  gonna move first.”

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, really." And Tony lowered his gauntlet.

Loki’s eyes widened. After a moment, he dropped his hand and let Tony slide a little ways down the wall before the inventor caught himself and took up coughing as he righted himself.

"Not a  _wise_  move,” Loki commented, but he didn’t seem disapproving so much as… lost.

"Seemed like someone had to start trusting someone here."

"Awfully late for that."

Once Tony could really stand again, his reached up with his unarmored hand and gripped Loki’s collar in a tight fist. “I’d say I’m right on time,” he argued and pulled Loki down into a fierce kiss.

Loki met him just as fiercely, and brought his hand up to wrap around Tony again with a very different intent. Even the softness of roaming hands hurt pressing over the bruises and cuts from their fight, made Tony gasp in pain and groan in pleasure, and damn, how he’d missed letting himself close his eyes like this and really  _feel_  the build of this, pleasure and want before it burned hot to overwhelm him, loving the way his heart beat fast and hard and paying attention to that as it turned into  _too_  fast and  _too_ hard to track. Getting lost on purpose.

Loki pulled back to breathe and looked on Tony with dark, curious eyes. “Bedroom?” he suggested.

"Blew it up." Tony smirked a little proudly.

Loki leaned back in and tutted, contriving to look sure once again. “Such a lack of foresight.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Right and you’re the king of-“

Loki kissed him quiet.

Tony really didn’t mind.


	22. Public/Semi-Public Sex

“Hush,” Loki warned, hearing footsteps somewhere below.

He and Tony were naked and connected in a compromising way by a banister in Tony’s Switzerland house, while two as yet unidentified pairs of feet walked a floor blow them, almost certainly Avengers.

Tony had had fun designing this house. All big, open concept. Every floor had lots of space that looked out on the lower ones. It had seemed like such a great idea, until he invited over a gang of superhero buddies, as well as a villain he really wanted to bang in every secluded nook and cranny, only to realize that nooks and crannies were scarce.

Loki had quickly grown bored with the bedroom, and so Tony was skinning his knees on the floor of the small third story hallway that led to the roof, the two of them very much visible to anyone sitting in the kitchen of the main floor who happened to look up from just the right angle.

But seriously, who ever looked up?

Unless there was a noise.

The footsteps were headed toward the kitchen and a blond head came into view below. That would be Cap.

Tony suppressed a groan as Loki pulled out of him, carefully slow. Tony felt a rush of relief and disappointment both that they weren’t going to be continuing their activities here. His next mansion was definitely going to have a closed floor plan. Lots of secluded little rooms. Rooms you could only get to by tugging the right book on a shelf or playing a certain set of notes on the piano. Really secluded. The “open concept” thing was definitely out.

Tony rolled sluggishly onto his back, working to be quiet about breathing through the fading excitement of what Loki had been doing to him a moment ago.

The he got a good look at Loki, still kneeling over him and smiling with a terrifying sort of glee, and Tony realized with a renewed increase in heart rate that their plans hadn’t so much been  _cancelled_  as  _altered_.

 _Whatever you’re about to do_ , Tony thought in Loki’s general direction,  _It’s really inadvisable_. Not that being able to say that out loud without being overheard would really discourage the trickster god.

Loki resettled to kneel between Tony’s knees. They had inched over a little further out of sight but were still easy enough to glimpse if Steve or his companion looked up. Loki’s hands wrapped around the inventor’s ankles and slid intently up his legs, and Tony heard the scrape of chairs as those below found seats at the kitchen table.

Tony lifted his head to meet Loki’s eyes, seriously considering gesturing for him to stop, but Loki smiled back at him with not-quite-innocent charm and lifted a finger to his lips for Tony to keep quiet, and Tony gave up the concept of stopping this before things got worse. He eased his head back to the floor, tried desperately to expel a slow, even breath as Loki mouthed at the point of his hip bone where belly met thigh. Oh, teeth. Teeth were such a good idea. This was about where Tony would normally be making approving noises to make sure Loki kept on doing  _just exactly that_.

But Tony didn’t make noises. Tony took another breath. Steaaaady.

The people in the kitchen were talking, too low for Tony to make out any words. The acoustics of the space were such that sound traveled down more easily than up. Again, very bad floor planning on Tony’s part. Maybe he’d sell the house. The second voice was Bruce. Tony closed his eyes and tried not to think about it.

Which was actually not that hard, because Loki’s mouth was moving in a very diverting direction, closer and closer to Tony’s cock. Tony bit his lip to keep any encouragements from spilling out. He bent one knee to put a foot flat to the floor, getting leverage to roll up a little into the touch of Loki’s lips, a nonverbal request to go on.

Loki pulled back. Tony bit his lip harder in preparation, and failed completely to not open his mouth and groan at the exquisite sensation of Loki’s soft mouth closing over him.

Loki stilled at the sound, and Tony froze a second later as he realized what he’d done. He lifted his head to meet Loki’s eyes again, and Loki looked back with a slightly wide-eyed,  _Oh dear, are we in trouble_? sort of look, and they both listened for a sound downstairs.

The microwave was beeping. It had been for long enough that it could have covered the sound Tony had made, and by the unperturbed tone of the low conversation still taking place below, no one in the kitchen had noticed anything amiss.

Okay. Tony took another unsteady breath. Loki pulled back, and Tony gasped at the motion and the wet friction, but he managed to keep it to a quiet gasp.

Loki crawled up around him, and Tony watched the diagonal lines of muscles shift under the skin of Loki’s side, the criss-cross of soft tissue and rib made more pronounced by Loki’s not-totally-controlled breathing.

Loki reached into thin air and produced a gag that Tony recognized well. A simple length of deep blue cloth, which the inventor knew from past experience was spelled to cancel out all noise from any mouth bound by it. After a nod of agreement, Loki slid the fabric into Tony’s mouth, pulled it tight, and Tony lifted his head, allowing Loki to tie it.The taste and texture of the silky material in his mouth brought on a world of recalled associations, all of them erotic, and many laced with an edge of thrilling terror, remembering what Loki liked to do and say to a lover rendered unable to talk back.

The sounds of his stifled breathing were quieted by the gag as Loki crept noiselessly back down Tony’s body and resumed where he had left off, and after that Tony’s awareness was filled and overwhelmed by the slide of Loki’s mouth surrounding him, sending waves of pleasure rolling through his body. Loki pulled back, sucking lightly, and Tony gasped noiselessly at motion and juxtaposition; the cool of damp skin exposed to air beside the blissful, permeating heat of Loki’s mouth. He felt vibrations in his own throat that should have been cries, were they not muted by Loki’s magic.

Through the frenzy of sensation, there was perfect silence. All Tony had to do now was not move enough to make any noisy impacts against the floor beneath him. That should be easy enough, right?

Loki’s mouth moved down, then up again; even as Tony bit hard at the cloth in the effort to resist the urge, his hips rolled up sharply, following the motion, and it was only Loki’s hand quickly moving to support his pelvis that stopped Tony from falling just as sharply back to the floor. Maybe Tony should have gone still then, tried to regain his control, but he just rolled up again and exhaled a breath that tried very hard to be a formless, pleading cry, and which succeeded only at stirring unoccupied air.

Loki went still again, gripping Tony’s hips to hold him in place. And it was an attentive stillness, so even as Tony’s head rolled despairingly to the side and his hands curled tightly in on themselves in frustration, he tore away some small scrap of his attention to note the sound of the chairs scraping and footsteps retreating.

Tony started to wonder if maybe they had-

But then Loki’s mouth was moving again, swallowing him down and making the world twist at funny angles. Tony felt his muscles pull and arch and his mind try vainly to catalogue and comprehend the rush, the breaking wave that should be numbing in intensity and force, shot through with the intimacy of warm wet skin still shifting and tasting where he could least ignore it.

Tony was twitching and shaking when Loki stopped and set down his hips. He’d be swearing all sorts of filthy compliments if he could talk. He was never going to get used to what Loki could do to him.

Loki lay down next to him and untied the gag, and Tony inhaled gratefully, still breathing hard and relieved to have the cloth out of the way, and the sound of his own breathing became very loud in his ears. “Wow.”

Loki smiled at that. “You’re not very good at keeping quiet, you know. We really must work on that, next time someone is in a position to see us.”

“They  _didn’t_  see us. Did they? Please don’t do that,” Tony added. Loki was teasingly pestering him with nuzzling touches along his shoulder and neck, unwelcome so early in Tony’s refractory period.

“We were sight-shielded,” Loki informed him. “They never would have seen us.”

“Why didn’t you tell  _me_  that?”

“You really have to ask?” Loki chuckled and bit lightly at Tony’s ear, prompting the hiss of a displeased inhale.

Tony glared at him. “Oh, hush.”


	23. Bonus Ficlet 2: Inconvenient Memories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prompt for day 18 was "Rimming."
> 
> I got as far was writing,
> 
> "If there was one thing Loki was sure of in this moment…
> 
> …it was that Tony’s beard was very, very prickly,"
> 
> before I gave up.
> 
> So instead you get an angsty ficlet about Tony and Loki trying to have sex and failing because of past traumas. Doesn't that sound like FUN?
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** PTSD, torture, drowning/suffocation, lack of porn.

Much like sleep, sex was a minefield for two people with unpleasant memories. They touched each other everywhere, and inevitably touched on things they would rather have avoided.

One night they had just reached the bed but not yet divested each other of any clothes, and Loki’s hand went to tangle in the hair just above the back of Tony’s neck as they kissed.

Suddenly Tony was drowning in a cave in Afghanistan, spluttering and struggling. Water filled his nose, caught sharply in the back of his throat as he gasped for air, splashed on his chest and sent painful jolts of electricity splintering through his limbs. He knew, mentally, that it wasn’t real, that it was a memory, but the memory had physical force and the terror was thick and unmanageable, and he struggled to get free.

A minute later, the world narrowed back into focus and he was sitting on the floor next to the bed while Loki stood at the far end of the room, eyeing him warily. “Tell me.”

“Back of the neck,” Tony gasped, “My hair, don’t — don’t grab it.”

Loki nodded.

Once Tony had calmed more, the god asked, “What happened?”

“Um…” Tony rubbed the back of his head himself, trying to erase the tension there, and the memory with it. “Holding people face down in shallow water is all the rage in torture these days.”

Loki understood, and his jaw clenched. He gestured toward Tony, and the state he was in, shaken and still sitting on the floor. “Did this ever happen with Pepper?”

Tony shook his head. “You’re stronger than Pepper. Bigger hands. It’s…” He took a deep breath and got to his feet. “It’s okay. I’m okay.” The little twitches in Tony’s fingers as he found his balance beckoned Loki back to him, and when the god approached, Tony leaned against him heavily.

Loki very carefully wrapped his arms around the smaller man, staying well clear of Tony’s neck. He felt Tony’s hands against his sides, bunching fabric. Loki looked down and saw that the inventor’s hands were fisted tightly in his shirt. Where Tony’s face was buried in his shoulder, Loki heard a telltale stagger in the man’s breathing.  _Perhaps not quite so okay_ , Loki concluded as tears of long overdue shock gathered in the cloth of his shirt, along with moisture from sharply exhaled breaths.

.:.

Then there was the time Tony pushed Loki down onto the bed, pressing a hand hard into the center of his bare chest and holding him down.

Loki went abruptly, painfully still and whispered, “Stop,” and Tony reflexively rolled away, landing on the far side of the bed before he had fully processed the word.

Loki lay frozen where he was for a few more seconds, eyes darting around and then squeezing tightly shut as he attempted to summon his focus to the present. With a bit of effort, he sat up, then took the alarm clock from the bedside table and threw it across the room with a low half-yell of frustrated shame, burying his face in his knees as the plastic shattered against the opposite wall.

Tony was feeling a little bit of shame himself, because he never would have manhandled a human lover that roughly.

But this was  _Loki,_  and Tony would do more harm than good by treating the man like he was made of glass.

On that note, “Hey. Loki.” He waited until the god regained enough composure to turn his head and meet Tony’s gaze. “Tell me.”

Loki turned his face away again, retreating from the command.

“What did they do to you?”

From between his knees, Loki’s voice said, “A great deal, but not this.”

Tony frowned.

Seeming to sense the expression, Loki sighed and finally looked up again, focusing on the ceiling. “This is nothing so tidy and sinister as enemies and torture.” He curled his own fingers to touch the center of his chest. “This is where Mjolnir once rested. Thor placed it there to stop me from destroying a world.”

Caught between the obvious necessity of that and the suffocating horror of the image, Tony gave up trying to figure out just who he wanted to punch in the face. Maybe the universe at large, but he had a feeling that would hurt.

Tony thought hard about what to say in reply, rejecting such solicitous tidbits as,  _Yeah, that would_ _be uncomfortable_ , and,  _Sounds like you kind of had it coming_.

“Okay,” Tony finally said, “So, I won’t do that again.”

And Loki, smart Loki, perceptive Loki, heard all the unsaid things. He smiled that unhappy smile of his that came with a sharp little snort of derisive amusement and said, “Good.”

-

There were nights when Tony just felt the warmth and weight of Loki sleeping against him and could not sleep for the awe of it.

He’d had moments like this with Pepper. Moments of, _Yes we really did end up together somehow and she feels so warm and right against me_.

But that had been a kind of dream, and it had ended. The love was real, but he and Pepper were too distinct, too baffled by each other. At some depths, they would always meet as strangers.

With Loki it all seemed more improbable, yet more real. This wasn’t a dream, and there was no doubt in Tony’s mind; he wasn’t waiting to wake up. Loki had taken him apart, had marked him irrevocably, and Tony would forever be different. He had been seen and loved exhaustively, until there was nothing left of him but Loki’s Tony.


	24. Roleplaying

It all started when Loki asked Tony to run lines with him.

The trickster was playing the part of Lancaster in Henry IV in a stage performance. Or rather, one of his aliases was. So Tony had dutifully taken the booklet and was reading opposite him while they lounged on the bed and Loki recited what he could recall of his lines.

It started out so innocently, but lazing around on a soft comforter with the god of mischief was no way to keep things innocent, especially when both Tony and Loki were fond of hearing each other’s voices go unsteady when subjected to teasing distraction.

By the time they got to Lancaster’s speech in the fourth act, it was a lost cause on Tony’s end. They were both shirtless, and he was only putting up the feeblest show of following along in the text as they moved forward. And licked downward, and Loki traced a flat hand over his chest and belly in what best approximated a circular motion and rubbed his nose in a feather-light touch along the line of Tony’s jaw, reciting, “My Lord of York, it better showed with you when that your flock, assembled by the bell…”

Loki worked one long-fingered hand under the front of Tony’s jeans, followed by a grasp and drag and a measured, firm touch that had Tony dropping his booklet. “F-fuck.”

“…encircled you to hear with reverence your exposition on the holy text…” Loki started chuckling through the words, and Tony was pretty sure it was at his expense, but that just didn’t help to make the sound any less sexy. “…than now to see you here an iron man…”

Brain turning to mush though it was, Tony forced himself to consider those words under the growing suspicion that he was being messed with. “It  _does not_  say that.”

“You’re not reading along,” Loki chided. He (tragically) pulled his hand free from Tony’s pants and reached up across the mortal’s upper body to retrieve the book where it had fallen on the bed beside his hand.

“There’s no way it-”

Loki placed a finger on the page below the relevant line and turned it so Tony could see, and raised an eyebrow coolly.

Tony squinted. “Oh, hey, it does say that.”

“You honestly thought I would lie to you?”

“Yup.” Tony snatched the book and tossed it aside again, rolled properly on top of Loki and stroked him through his jeans, pressing his palm down for one firm, careful grind and mouthing down along the center of his chest. “So what comes next?”

Loki gasped and then forced his breathing to steady far enough to reply. “I don’t… uh… there’s a bit about turning the word to sword…” Tony bit lightly at his nipple and Loki squirmed and rolled up encouragingly. “…and life to death. After that I can’t remember until  _what mischiefs might he set abrooch_.”

“Oh really? What mischiefs would those be?”

Loki took advantage of their unfair difference in strength to roll Tony under him, then grinned down triumphantly. “Rebellion,” he replied shortly, and went to work removing Tony’s pants.

A little preparation, and then Tony was being fucked with enough force and precision that he would have believed Loki if he’d said one of the characters was named Tony Stark. Because that was  _his_  name, right? It was something like that, anyway.

Pleasure was shooting hard along his nerves in a steady rhythm, and if this was a war he was pretty sure he was losing it. Pretty sure he wanted to be. There was blurring and bowing, reality warping just a bit like someone was pulling back a bowstring for a shot, and Tony came hard between Loki’s hands while a lusty elizabethan voice gasped reverent profanities against his skin.

A while later, but before either of them really felt up to moving again, Tony said, “I vote we adjourn for today. Shakespeare makes me very tired, I’m finding out.”

“Alright.”

“How does it end, anyway?”

“I offer you a false peace agreement and trick you into sending your army to scatter, we share a drink, and once you’re all alone and at my mercy… I arrest you, and execute you for treason.”

Tony closed his eyes and sighed. “Of course you do.”


	25. Sensory Deprivation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was one of my favorite prompts, and my most popular fill over on tumblr.
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** A general tone of unease.

“Sensory deprivation,” Loki had said, and Tony had thought,  _Y_ _eah, that sounds like a hoot_. Loki had insisted on establishing a safe word, and Tony hadn’t particularly comprehended his adamance.

He really hadn’t realized.

He hadn’t realized how intense  _nothing_  was.

Maybe it was more so because Loki did it with magic. No blindfolds, no white noise. Just a word and a gesture and a world of blackness and silence. Lukewarm air that didn’t move against skin. The cloth of his clothes and the bed under him seemed to be gone, so there was no texture. No input.

He was left for a while like that, while his senses tried and tried to adjust to lack of stimulation, eyes working to settle far enough to find a little grey among the black, ears searching for the slightest inconsistencies in the silence. Skin starting to pick out the pressure of the air around him as a sensation unto itself, like floating in water.

With the lack of external prompting, his thoughts grew oddly stagnant, latching onto the phrase

_sensory deprivation_

and repeating it over and over on a loop like a mantra, until the syllables became odd and meaningless.

_Sensory deprivation sen sory depriv ation sen so ryd ep riv a tion sen deprydsenvivsorysensorydeprivationsenrivationsory…_

Then there was a touch.

A warm brush of skin against his left side, low above the outside of his hip, and it sent a burst of heat running through his body that felt a little like bright light in the darkness and sent goosebumps across his belly and down his left thigh. Tony thought he might have gasped, but couldn’t hear to be sure.

The touch was there and gone in an instant, leaving him alone with his reactions as his heartbeat slowed and brought him back toward homeostasis, the rush of heat at the simple touch dispersing evenly throughout his body.

A few minutes of feeling his nerves calm, then it was back to darkness and nothing.

He waited.

_…ryd ep rivationsen…_

_…Oh god_. There was mouth licking hot across the top of his chest, and a hand splaying out next to that, all out of nowhere, and then Loki moved up, nose skimming up the curve of Tony’s neck all the way up to his chin, goosebumps again, washing down through him, settling in his groin as a growing tightness.

Loki moved away again, the hand and the face disappearing from his skin, the constant darkness crowding back into his awareness and growing more pressing as he felt the echoes of that touch vivid along his chest and throat, ghost caresses, the fire of it slowly burning down and shooting occasional lingering sparks along his nerves.

A long time passed, but this time Tony couldn’t fully regain his sense of calm. He was alert, constantly anticipating the next touch, aroused with a tension that was almost painful for the lack of pressure on his skin.

 _…orydeprivationsensorydepr…_  He found himself seeking comfort in the monotony of the now flavorless series of syllables running through his head, all meaning worn away in the rhythm of his mind beating against the silence, drumming so much steadier than the pace of his heart.

Then there was a finger sliding down the line of his back, and Tony tried to whimper.

It happened over and over again, the touches coming and going, sometimes long and intimate, kissing and groping and firm and wonderful, sometimes just a light, near innocent brush against his elbow or his shin or elsewhere. Often with a long and maddening wait in between, sometimes not. There were no constants but darkness, no handholds but silence. Even the mantras in his head were giving in to pleas and expletives that formed and vibrated in his mouth but made no noise.

Loki’s fingers were on his abdominal muscles, skimming down and down and back, and started to work him open and the sting of that became Tony’s only reality, painful and perfect in a way that reminded him a little of rock concert acoustics, when the noise was so loud it tore at his ears and reverberated satisfyingly in his chest. This, Loki’s fingers in him, it  _hurt_ , but he needed the pressure of it like he needed oxygen.

It was wonderful, how long it took. No retreat, just pain and pushing and the relief of intimate, knowing touch stretching him apart.

When the fingers did finally withdraw, Tony heaved a series of despairing, terrified breaths, wondering how long Loki was going to leave him here for, wondering if he could take any more of this.

Then Loki was everywhere, and Tony wasn’t sure if he could take that either, flush against him, chest to chest and cheek to cheek and slim thighs pressing between his, one of Loki’s hands spread flat against his upper back, the other grasping firm around one of his hips, and Tony thought that at least if this was what broke him, the barrage of warm skin against him, it would be a pleasant sort of breaking. A hot, melting, cracking insanity instead of cold and solid one.

Loki slid into him, slowly and steadily, and Tony’s hips were jerking and bucking with it, overwhelmed, needing escape and needing more, closer, madder. His motions ended up being feeble and lopsided with Loki still holding tight to one of his hips, but that was okay because Loki didn’t stop pushing closer, and once he was in the trickster found an angle he knew well and started to thrust out and in again, over and over and against a spot that sent pulses of blinding pleasure along Tony’s nerves and all the way out to his fingertips.

He registered that he could hear Loki breathing, and he didn’t have enough comprehension left to know what the change meant, but the sound was staggered and harsh and desperate, was viscerally _good_. He tightened around where Loki was inside him, running on instinct and trying to prove he could alter what he heard, have some handhold on the input of his senses.

“Tony,” said Loki’s voice, and the sound of it shook in Tony’s ears, rough and smooth, elegant and broken, the only word that had ever been in this silent place, and it spoke the world apart with shattering pleasure. The melting quake of orgasm really did seem to reverberate through him, as did the sound of Loki calling out again as the god came shortly after.

It was a long time before Tony even came down enough to register that his bedroom had reappeared around him, dark but still clear and textured after all that black, alive with the hum of housing, electronics and heating and the ambient noise of New York City. The smell of satin sheets, and each breath of it released a little more pleasant heat to rush along his bloodstream and settle him. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever had it quite that intense.

He hadn’t realized how intense  _nothing_  was.


	26. Sex at a Wildly Inappropriate Location

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Featuring actual villain!Loki, with subtly angsty implications. Set a little before Cap 2.

When Tony heard about SHIELD’s plan to build several new helicarriers in the interest of world security, he was very conflicted. On the one hand, he’d made certain commitments to accountability when it came to who used his technology. On the other hand,  _horrible blender turbines of doom_. Very bad. So he set up another deep hack of SHIELD’s systems, hoping to see what nefarious purposes he ran the risk of having his technology repurposed toward.

And it was a lot harder than the first time. Apparently the best hacker in the Rising Tide had teamed up with the suits — that was just so many levels of wrong. (But was it as wrong as Iron Man having an illicit affair with a believed-to-be-dead supervillain?)

He didn’t find anything too incriminating on SHIELD this time, so he sent along the designs for the repulsor engines. But the hack left him with a few questions about SHIELD’s more evil sounding enemies.

So, the next time a certain trickster god stopped by his place (for the usual nightcap and morning coffee), Tony plied the other man with alcohol and questions about his connections in the world of villainy. They had a fun time of it for a while, Loki working to redirect the conversation to sex, Tony trying to stay on topic, the results being wit and double entendre of every kind. But eventually Loki grew exasperated and asked,  “Do you honestly think I’m going to answer any of these?”

“Do you know anything about someone called ‘The Clairvoyant’?” Tony questioned, undeterred.

Loki fixed him with a long look, sighed, and set down his glass.  “I suggest a game.”

“A game?” Tony echoed.

The trickster stood lightly up from his barstool and stalked toward Tony, and Tony felt his skin prickle with a low-level sense of threat as Loki came to stand behind where he sat. “A competition of sorts,” Loki elaborated quietly, and Tony could feel warm breath ghost along the back of his neck and a deft hand settling on his shoulder and sliding down his arm. “I’m going to…  _distract_  you. And when I think you are...  _sufficiently distracted..._  I’m going to fuck you in the Clairvoyant’s bed.” Tony could feel Loki’s hand tug up briefly with the motion of a deep shrug. “Perhaps you’ll notice something of use to you during that time. Perhaps not.” Loki trapped the lobe of Tony’s ear between two soft lips and then pulled back again to grin when Tony made a weak, aroused noise in the back of his throat. “I  _suspect_ not.”

Tony took a steadying breath, then took another one. “Look, if playing this game with you is going to get in the way of you  _actually telling_  me anything of use…”

Loki’s other hand settled on Tony’s side and started inching up, teasingly a little too slow to provide much of the pleasure of simple friction, and his mouth pressed close again to Tony’s ear, sending a series of buzzing chills down the inventor’s body as Loki’s words vibrated warm in his ear. “Tony, I have no  _actual_ _intention_  of letting you see what’s to come. My own plans would be jeopardized if you were to interfere with those of the Clairvoyant. Have no mistake that in this particular game, I  _am_  your enemy.” His hand brushed against the lower edge of the arc reactor just slightly then, more in warning than in actual threat, and Tony felt himself going hard almost painfully fast at the brief thrill of fear that inspired, even as Loki’s hand retreated off towards the side. “The question is, if I risk it all on a dare with you, will I  _lose_? Can you use my hubris against me?” Loki’s mouth left Tony’s ear then so his nose could trace a long stripe down the side of Tony’s neck, even as one thumb stroked down hard over one of Tony’s nipples through his shirt, the two motions lining up like a circuit completing, one too light and the other too sharp, combining to make Tony swear and lean forward into Loki’s hand. “Would you like to be my downfall, Tony Stark? I always find it an  _absolute pleasure_  to be yours.”

The inventor’s mouth fell open, lightly affronted by those last words, though Loki couldn’t see it. “Oh, you are  _so on_ ,” he said, but his voice was less steady than he would have liked.

He heard a light chuckle and felt his shirt collar flutter a little in the path of Loki’s breath.

Then the hand on his arm and the hand on his chest were both sliding down his sides, unbuttoning his belt with graceful series of grasps and tugs, and then there was one hand down his…

“Oh god,” Tony muttered, quick and low and inadvertent, as Loki’s stroked once along his length.

He could feel the trickster’s nose and forehead pressed above his ear, so Loki’s words were once again accompanied by the damp, shivering warmth of his breath. “Today, you really ought to hope  _not_.”

“Oh yeah?” Tony asked, trying for unfazed banter but hearing his voice grow more and more cracked as Loki’s hand did absolutely beautiful things to his cock. “What makes you so sure? I’m gonna walk up to Fury and tell him I figured out who SHIELD’s number one enemy is while a god was giving me head. Just to see the look on his face.”

“Nice try Tony, but the terms were very specifically that I be  _fucking_  you.” Loki’s free hand left its resting place low on the front of Tony’s waist and there was the light click of the cap coming off a bottle. Loki could, Tony had already learned on previous occasions, collect a dollop of lube from the bottle one-handed  _without_  using magic or spilling any, and the level of dexterity that implied was still somehow profoundly unsettling to the inventor.

But if “unsettling” weren’t near synonymous with “hot,” well, then, he really wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with, would he?

A hand with two wet fingers slid down the back of his pants and set about gently working him open. “Wooh. Wow. Well. Can’t blame a guy for trying,” Tony said conversationally. “You have to admit it would be… uh, distracting,” he finished lamely as a second Loki appeared, suddenly standing between Tony’s legs and leaning over him, very much naked and immediately starting in on the buttons of Tony’s shirt to bring him to a similar state. “N-no magic,” Tony argued. “It’s cheating.”

“Then you should have specified,” said the Loki behind him.

“It’s—” Tony stopped short as Loki’s fingers dragged over his prostate, then took a moment to catch his breath before he finished, “It’s _always_ cheating.”

Having removed all the clothing from the top half of his body, the new Loki leaned in and grinned close against his face in a way that was all kinds of wonderful and unsettling. “We need magic to  _get there_ , Tony.”

“Fair point,” Tony conceded. He didn’t have much will to argue further anyway, as his hands seemed to have started exploring the body in front of him of their own accord, firm and smooth and well-muscled under his fingers and really not something Tony could remember just now why he  _wouldn’t_  want to have between his legs.

His hands briefly lost their playground as that Loki withdrew to pull Tony’s pants down over his ankles — allowing the inventor a stunning view from above of how godly shoulders curved down into back and then backside — and then Loki was back, running his hands up and down Tony’s bared thighs and capturing his mouth in a kiss that was slow but still somehow aggressive, pressure and force and bite, and Tony started to lose himself in a blur of rhythm and scattered thoughts after that. Between the hand in his ass, the hand on his cock, and the two hands that were roaming wherever Loki damn well pleased, Tony found himself making all kinds of embarrassing noises, some satisfied groans and some half-stifled, needy whines. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t come right now if he let himself, but he also  _needed more_.

He grabbed at the second Loki’s hair and yanked him back just far enough to free his mouth, earning an aroused noise from the duplicate that made it hard for Tony to focus, but eventually he summoned the words, “W-when are we going to go to the Clairvoyant’s place?”  _Good god, Loki, when are you going to actually fuck me?_

The relevant Loki grinned against his mouth, but it was the one behind him who spoke. “When you can no longer speak coherently to ask me that question.” Then Tony was being kissed again, hard and slow until he couldn’t think at all, could only grip and shift into pleasure and shudder away again and hold back in hopes of making it all last.

Loki had a very precise talent for knowing when Tony went from  _wanting_ him to continue to  _needing_  him to continue, and for stopping just at that moment. The human was pretty sure it was one of those skills that came of being categorically  _evil_. When the rhythm of Loki’s hands became steady beat that defined his reality, that was when those hands vanished and sent Tony spinning fast out into the void of desperation, like a step breaking underfoot when running down a flight of stairs, or like the awful and sharp sense of falling that sometimes woke him from a good dream. He barely noticed the actual moment of teleport for how much the disorientation felt like an extension of that loss,  just a few more inches of jarring darkness at the end of a mile-long plummet.

And he didn’t really register it except in terms of the fact that the Loki behind him was gone and had been replaced with a somewhat soft surface, and the Loki before him was pushing him down flat to it, pulling his hips up and bolstering something soft under them and —

— and pushing into him, and Tony was gasping with it, being filled with a stretching slide and hot friction and the sound of a dark but breathless chuckle whispering across his throat.

Then the rhythm took up, Loki rolling his hips forward and back and the impact running through Tony, deep and full so he took up rolling into it in turn finding perfection and only wanting more.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, Tony remembered to glance away from the captivating sight of the god kneeling over him and staring down at him with dark and hungry intent. Look away and look for — something? There were grey walls, and that was important, but he couldn’t remember why. Grey walls, though. Filing that away. Then Tony’s eyes closed very much against their will, and he made a sound lost somewhere between a scream and a grunt as Loki’s hand wrapped around him in one firm, enveloping tug. He fell into the glorious and terrifying lurch of orgasm, the kind that made gravity seem to lose its hold on him and grip him tighter all at once, until he couldn’t breath, until every breath was an ecstatic burst of light and his blood struck pleasant sparks against his veins.

Loki kept moving in him, sharp and painful but also striking more sparks, and Tony was floating somewhere in a sea that rippled wonderfully when the god came inside him, and rocked only a little when a word and a spell took them to Tony’s bed to rest together exhausted atop neatly made covers.

“So, what did you learn?” Loki asked him a good while later.

Tony groaned and then blinked dumbly. “I think there was a color.”


	27. Sex Toys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Bondage, power dynamics.

When Loki had first suggested the notion of an anal hook, Tony had called veto right away. He had issues with having his hair pulled, and not many of the other popular bondage positions associated with the toy looked especially safe or fun to him, and… just no.

Then he reconsidered.

And he realized: Loki had very nice hair. Long and flowing and perfect for bending his head back and exposing that glorious throat…

Tony reconsidered very thoroughly.

.:.

“I meant for you,” Loki pointed out when Tony brought forth his counter-offer.

“I know. I just have a better idea.”

“And by better, you mean more humiliating for me and less so for you.”

“What other meaning could the word ‘better’ possibly have?” Tony queried.

Then he started considering logistics. “It’ll have to be fitted. You need a lot of precision with that sort of toy.”

“ _That_ is what magic is for. But how will you convince me to submit to such treatment?”

“By pointing out that you already want it.”

Loki scoffed. “That’s far too easy.”

Tony tilted his head speculatively. “But would it be, for anyone but me?”

It was a convincing move, playing to the uniqueness of his insight into the workings of Loki’s mind and desires. To the knowledge that where Loki wanted to defeat, there was often under that a strong desire to be defeated. That if Loki wanted to bind, he likely wanted to be bound.

Loki visibly considered, and shook his head. “Still, I think you should have to earn my cooperation.”

“Well, what about a trade? Next time we can do whatever you want to do.”

Loki inclined his head, sensing blood in the water. “ _Whatever_ I want to do?”

“Not the threesome with Pepper!” Tony added quickly, suddenly remembering one of the few other sex ideas he’d ever really said no to. “Besides that.”

“Too late. I’ve already thought up my terms.”

“Do you realize how she’d react to that?”

“Better than you fear, unless I’m very mistaken. And I only request that you ask.”

“She’s my ex, Loki.”

“Which is why I want to do it.” Loki shrugged as if he were being perfectly reasonable. “She’s the only person who has more experience with your body than I do, and I’d love to find out just what she’s learned.” Only Loki could make the word ‘love’ sound that vicious and enticing.

But still. “No.”

“Alright.” Loki lifted his hands in a sign of nonaggression, playing at backing off.

But when he added, “You know my terms,” and dropped the topic entirely, Tony knew he was doomed.

Loki had this way of leaving him to reconsider.

.:.

Two weeks later, and without any discussion in between, Tony came back to their bedroom one evening and Loki immediately put down his book and got out the toy to show him.

Tony picked the object up out of Loki’s hands and examined it: a beautiful construction of shining metal, a small loop on one end for rope, the other end curving to a hook that ended in a simple metal sphere.  “I said ‘no,’” he pointed out without heart.

“But you’ve entirely changed your mind as of two days ago.” Loki’s tone was both matter-of-fact and slightly questioning, as if he were checking in to make sure the earth really was round.

“Dammit, _how can you know that_?”

“You’re avoiding Pepper.”

“Okay. Yes,” Tony granted.

Loki grinned. “Now, I knew you would say that sooner or later.”

“Asshole.”

“Of course. What use would this have otherwise?” Loki quipped as he took the hook back from Tony. He tilted his chin commandingly toward to the closet. “Go pick out a rope.”

Tony went to the closet and opened the rope drawer, considering the options of neatly stored cords of varying color and width. He chose something slim and cream colored, what he knew from experience was just a shade darker than most of Loki’s skin.

He strode back to where Loki stood and tossed the rope on the bed before pulling the god down for a hungry kiss. He disentangled himself from his tie and jacket with some assistance from his partner, but stopped Loki’s hands unbuttoning his shirt, and set his focus on undressing the taller man.

“Do you intend to be clothed for this event?” Loki’s question, once Tony let up kissing him to breathe, was sardonic, but there was real curiosity underneath.

“Maybe,” Tony allowed, kissing his way down Loki’s jaw and not really bothering to lift his mouth away to pronounce the word. He finished unbuttoning Loki’s shirt and pushed down the sleeves to make it fall to the floor. Loki moved his arms back with the motion and allowed the manhandling.

He also allowed Tony to push him gently back by his chest until he fell flat to the bed, the inventor crawling up over him with knees on either side of his legs.

Tony went straight for the vulnerable skin just below Loki’s bellybutton, mouthing at it and dragging just a bit of teeth into play, and Loki made a sound in the back of his throat he wasn’t proud of, the heat of that contact catching him a little off guard and going through him like a shock.

“Sorry, didn’t hear that. Could you speak up?” Tony bit harder at that same spot, trying to elicit a similar reaction again.

Loki bit his lip just to thwart him.

Then Tony’s hands were working his pants and boxers down over his hips. Loki would never get used to those hands. Gestures and craftsmanship lived in those hands. Tony’s hands, that wouldn't take a gift unless you put it down first (or gained his trust first), but offer him a god whole and you were in business. Those hands slid down over Loki’s ankles and then away, tossing the garments aside.

A new kind of quiet fell once Loki was naked, their usual well of jokes and banter drying up as the power shifted over to Tony, still clothed, and they ceased to be on even ground. The air between them was always charged with pull and power and fascination.

Without jokes to cut it, that charge had a way of just building, quiet and heavy.

Tony felt a few sparks of it as he touched his fingers to Loki’s ankles and shifted the god’s legs into position. He spread a little lubricant onto his fingers and started working Loki open, watched the rapid motions of Loki’s eyes, blinking, falling closed, occasionally crinkling in a wince at the stretch.

It didn’t take long, not even needing to stretch Loki as far as he had for the previous night’s activities. Tony withdrew his fingers soon enough, and Loki bit his lip again, like he thought that motion was another play to force his voice into the silence, like he was still trying to be contrary.

“On your side,” Tony ordered, and manhandled Loki’s legs as he liked again as the god obeyed.

He took care in coating the business end of the hook in lubricant, before he placed the rounded end between Loki’s cheeks and heard him hiss at the cold.

Right. Cool metal in sensitive spots. That could be not fun, at least until the toy absorbed the warmth of Loki’s body. “Need a minute?”

“Don’t. Stop.”

Tony’s eyebrows shot up and then he felt a slow smile appear in his face. Obediently, he pushed the toy in, gently, but working quickly so as not waste the chill.

Loki’s breath came out harsh at the intrusion and the cold, and Tony pushed on and on, slow and steady through the sound of more sharp exhales until the hook was set in place, ring resting at the very base of Loki’s back.

Loki was still on his side, Tony sitting up behind him. The inventor reached for the cord, a pale coil against dark blue bedding, and tied the first end to the ring at the base of Loki’s back with sure fingers. He heard the little anticipatory stutter in Loki’s breathing as his fingers brushed the god’s skin, incidentally to the task.

He gripped Loki’s arms and pulled them back, lining up his forearms together across the indentation of his lower spine, paused a moment to see the very light expansion and contraction of Loki’s back with each breath.

He moved the rope thoughtfully. Considering his options.

Tony always took distinct pleasure in the act of tying Loki up. It was like an art, like assembling the suit. Using his hands to bend and weave materials to his will, tricky and fascinating and absorbing.

Abandoning the ring to think on later, he started anew with Loki’s hair, knotting a second piece of rope so it would braid securely into those silky locks. He’d chosen the pale beige chords just for the contrast they would make, twined into Loki’s hair, bright amid woven darkness, twined tight and binding to tug sharp at Loki’s skull.

Realizing Tony didn’t have any immediate plans to tie his arms in place, Loki let them fall slack, triggering a dissatisfied noise from the human. “Hold still,” he muttered, pushing Loki’s arms back into place.

“Make me.”

“Yeah, working on it.” Tony finished with Loki’s hair and continued the braided pattern as he worked downward, first past Loki’s arms and straight to the hook, pulling Loki’s head back to a precise angle as he tied the braid into place. He worked a pillow under Loki’s head so the position wouldn’t tire his neck. “Okay?” he questioned.

“Okay,” Loki said, but it was very breathless.

“Sure you can breathe?”

“Very sure.”

Tony nodded, though Loki couldn’t see it, and started working back up, finally tying Loki’s forearms together into the web-like network of rope and limbs he was slowly constructing. This wouldn’t be simple to unwind at all — if Loki needed to get out quickly he’d need the pair of scissors from the bedside drawer.

But it was breathtaking, especially when Loki started to writhe and struggle, sensing how securely the rope was now restraining his upper body. Tony watched as tendon and muscle strained against rope, rope cut into skin, stray locks of feather-black hair from the braid brushed teasingly against Loki’s upper back with the motions, and heard Loki’s breathing grow harsher still as the motions tugged on the metal hook in ways that Loki didn’t directly control. He could only struggle and manipulate and hope for whatever angle he might most want.

Tony was hard as rock just watching it, and he reached down to undo the front of his pants, to take the pressure off, stroking a bit while his hand was there and letting the image in front of him burn pleasantly along his nerves for just a little bit before returning to his task.

He tied Loki’s legs together just above the knees, and then again at the ankles, and tied together two of his toes for good measure, enjoying the completeness of it, the reiteration.

By the time Tony was done with that, he was positioned to be able to see Loki’s face, tilted back too far still for Loki to see him in turn. Time to finally fix that, and become more than a shadow with fingers and a voice.

He scooted over until he was in Loki’s field of vision, watch those green eyes dilate and darken when Tony came into view. Loki’s posture was open and tied into place that way, the muscles of his neck and chest stretched tight with it.

Tony settled onto his own knees in front of Loki and reached out a hand, skimming his fingers up the center of Loki’s chest and up, and up. And, yup, that neck was really something with Loki’s head bent back and bound in place. Tony let his hand settle around it in a proprietary way, what would be a violent touch if he bothered to apply any pressure. But he kept his touch light, thumb and middle finger falling into the nooks under opposite corners of Loki’s jaw.

Loki looked up at him and swallowed, so Tony felt the whole of his throat convulse under his hand.

He held onto that power, and held, and the tension built, and built.

Finally, Tony moved his hand back down to the base of Loki’s neck, bent down and kissed the skin under his chin. Gentle, except that Loki couldn’t get away. The god’s head twitched sharply forward, automatically trying to arch his neck back from the tickling of Tony’s beard and lower his chin protectively. Then he gasped at how that tugged at the toy, a sound of pain and also of things very much not pain.

“You like that?” Tony inquired, and there a bit of playful gloating in his voice, but under that it was a serious question.

He pulled back when he didn’t hear and answer, hoping he would find one on his lover’s expressive face.

Loki opened his mouth to answer, searching, and what came out was not a word but a conflicted, helplessly aroused sort of whimper.

Loki cleared his throat, licked his lips, tried again. “A bit.”

“Well, if you’re feeling that mild about it.” Tony shrugged and leaned back pulling his hand away from the base of Loki’s throat. “I could keep my hands and my mouth to myself, just sit back and see if you can get yourself off all trussed up like that. What do you think?”

The god’s eyes widened at first, then after a few seconds they narrowed intently. “…I think you might ultimately reconsider.”


	28. Spanking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter involves denial and Tony being restrained. IDK if that warrants formal warnings, but now you know.

Tony is lying on his back on his bed, black cotton sheets in the periphery of his vision, lending an interesting sort of focus to the sight above him.

Loki, shirtless and bathed in warm lamplight, grinning with a wicked spark in his eyes, like he has an idea.

Tony’s got a pretty good sense at this point of how the god is in bed, and he’s starting to think there should be a law against Loki having ideas.

They’re both shirtless, both still tragically trapped in blue jeans, and Loki is straddling Tony’s upper thighs in a way that pushes the fabric tight around not just their erections, but the muscles Tony might ordinarily move to get any relief after all the necking and licking they’ve been… well,  _are still_ … aaand that’s Loki leaning down and having _way_  too much fun licking the very sensitive spot just under where the center of Tony’s rib cage ends.

Tony inhales sharply at the not-quite-tickle of it, then again, and again. Maybe not so much a tickle but a sharp, half-intrusive heat dancing under his skin wherever Loki touches him, and skittering out from there and melting into his nerves.

He can get a little bit of motion with the way his hips are pinned down, just not enough. And god knows there’s plenty of warm weight pressed on top of him, crushing him down, if he could only push just a  _little_  harder up into it.

He runs his hands over Loki’s thighs, wondering what he’d have to do to get Loki to do the moving for him, and feels rough denim under his fingers.

Loki moves up, grabs hold of either side of Tony's head and kisses him, and Tony loses his train of thought, or maybe it crashes, because he’s pretty sure there’s heat and crushing pressure and ruin at play here.

Loki kisses like fire and chaos. Loki of all people  _should_  kiss like fire and chaos, Tony thinks confusedly, and he  _does_ , so that works out then.

Because Loki is the god of kissing, right?

Definitely.

Tony feels feather-soft hair falling over his face, smells dry shampoo and damp sweat, arousal and linens, feels the puzzle of a metal button and zipper under the pads of his fingers, feels Loki’s strong hands form demanding fists in his hair, he feels…

He feels dizzy.

Loki finally lets up on the kiss and they’re both panting. Loki’s lips are wet and his eyes are dark, and the lamplight from one side of the bed has half his face in shadow.

And for all that arousal and darkness, Loki still looks smug, still looks like he’s got a  _plan_ , and Tony can’t find the breath to ask what it is. Those clever hands are still fisted in his hair, and he feels another sliding up the centerline if his stomach, following the same line Loki’s mouth had…

Wait.

Tony blinks, realized that  _yes_ , he  _is_  sufficiently turned on and confused and dizzy to count three hands where there should be two, and decides not worry about it too much just yet. Focus on other things.

After all, he still hasn’t figured out what Loki looks so smug about.

Then he has Loki’s zipper undone and reaches past denim seams and cotton boxers, hearing the light clink of an unclasped belt shifting with the motion as he shoves his hand in and grabs at what he finds, and Loki gasps.

But the god apparently is very focused on his own plans, because he wraps a hand firmly around Tony’s wrist to pull it back and away, while the other is still teasing up and down his abs.

Wait…

Loki’s still leaning in to hold Tony’s head where it is, Tony feels the burn of his hair in the hold, can see where Loki’s muscles stand out at the juncture of shoulder and chest to reach forward.

Tony counts four hands.

The hand on his right wrist moves it back, pushing the human’s arm flat to the mattress at his side, elbow bent, hand palm-up near his shoulder. Between that and the way his head is being held in place, he’s starting to feel a little bit trapped. And it doesn’t help that Loki’s still staring down at him like he’s a meal and the god’s considering how much he can get away with playing with his food before he kills it.

The hand — (and he’s pretty sure it’s not a real hand) — the hand on his torso moves up to his chest, and retreats to just one finger, circling his arc reactor, and Tony can feel how the sensation moves in and out from one patch of skin to another, some of the scar tissue almost numb just next to the metal casing, some distinctly not.

Tony hasn’t said anything about the direction things are going, good or bad, and Loki’s eyes narrow in curiosity. (And maybe,  _maybe_  just a little bit of concern.) And he leans down and presses his mouth to Tony’s jaw before he speaks. “I’m somewhat proud of this particular magic trick, Tony. Tell me, do you appreciate its qualities?” There’s hot, damp breath puffing against his skin with every word.

Talking. Loki is asking him to talk. Loki is pinning him down by his head and his hips and his wrist and asking in _Loki language_ if that’s okay.

Tony might possibly have failed to remember that talking is even a thing. His left hand is still free but he’s mostly forgotten how to use it, just gripping Loki’s thigh for something to hold, like his body thinks doing that will somehow grant him enough leverage to get some satisfaction out of the feeble grinding motions his hips are still attempting.

He pulls in a breath, gathers his thoughts, and fortunately the thing he needs to communicate is fairly simple. “Yes,” he croaks.

Loki’s eyes narrow a bit further. Apparently he’s looking for something a bit more detailed before assuming he’s got the all clear. Damn.

Tony clears his throat and manages a slightly steadier tone this time. “This is a good trick. I like everything about this trick. You should keep -”

He’s cut short when Loki bites Tony’s jaw and starts nibbling up toward his ear, so apparently he’s got the message now. A pause, then the human sighs and gladly gives up trying to remember how to talk.

The god’s hips have to roll forward a little so he can reach to kiss Tony’s ear. Tony feels the bedding settle under his upper back near when Loki’s elbows come to rest against the sheets. But what matters is the way Loki’s hips move, the fact that for one glorious second Tony can get just a bit of the grind he’s been looking for, hot delicious pressure on his cock. Then Loki’s body motionless again, teasing him even more now that he’s sitting just a few crucial inches higher up, but at least Tony can still get a little bit of motion on his own, right?

He feels a strong, long-fingered hand settled firmly over his thigh, limiting his movement even more, and his whine of frustration is swallowed up when Loki shifts down again to kiss his mouth, deep and all-consuming.

So there’s a hand on his leg and a hand on his wrist and a finger teasing his chest and hands in his hair and some of them are stroking and some are restraining and they all feel  _real_  and solid and alive and Tony has very much lost track of how many hands. And he’s too busy being kissed like it’s a war to be able to open his eyes and try to get a look at any of them.

His own left hand is still just clutching at Loki’s denim-clad leg, and there’s another Loki-hand sliding up and down the outside of that arm. Sometimes it settles around his wrist or his biceps, like the touch might become another restraint, but then it just moves on, caressing up and down, warm and light, making his skin prickle and hair stand on end wherever it touches.

And now there’s a hand sliding  _under_  his clothes and down along his back where it’s pressed to the mattress. That shouldn’t be possible, and it feels kind of weird. Like Loki has wormed his hand between Tony’s back and the sheets beneath, but there’s not force pushing his body up to make room, and that hand is stroking easy as anything down along the line of spine, like there’s no friction from the cloth underneath impeding it.

It slides down even further, and apparently the jeans wrapped tight around Tony’s ass are no obstacle either, because Loki grabs hold of one of Tony’s cheeks and kneads it appreciatively, much the way he has in the past with the hands that he keeps attached to his god-damned body.

Then that hand is just  _gone_ , vanished, and Tony wonders where it went and if any of the other hands are going to disap-

 _Whap_.

Tony registers the sound first, and second comes the pain blossoming along his skin. It hurts, it hurts spectacularly, it’s something distinct and sharp after all this teasing.

He has just enough time to wonder how the slap even made a sound when there wasn’t any air there to displace, but it happens again and Tony’s already-heavily-sabotage knowledge of physics is just  _gone_. Because there’s just enough force behind that hand to push him up, to get that precious little bit of friction between his cock and Loki’s thigh that he’s been after this whole time, and it’s a flash of grinding and hot white sparks that only last for the split second where his hip is forced up with the impact.

Then it’s gone again, the hand vanished, dispersing pain and dispersing pleasure spreading heat through his hips and his core, mixing together in the most confusing way.

Loki lets up on the kiss to stare down at Tony’s face, pupils blown wide and black, hungrily taking in his reaction. Tony’s gasping for breath. He’s not sure what his face looks like but he can guess it’s probably some variation on _wrecked_. As soon as he can get enough breath the words start pouring out, “Loki,  _please_ … please-please-please.” He doesn’t even have to think about it, doesn’t have to make the words come, and he’s honestly not sure he could stop them if he tried. “Please do it again Loki,  _please_ , I need it, I need it, I-”

Loki does. A hard slap lands on Tony’s ass. Again, that little bit of friction against Loki thigh, the press of warm flesh as much as he can feel it between the barrier of two pairs of jeans and his own boxers. Mixing with hot red pain and then a lingering sting in the shape of Loki’s hand.

Tony finds that he actually can’t stop begging just because he’s got what he wanted. “ _I need it, I need it, I need it_ ,” just keeps tumbling out of his mouth, and apparently that’s the right thing to be saying, because Loki slaps him again, and again, picking up a steady rhythm.

Loki’s hands are all over him, everywhere, carding through his hair and brushing lovingly down the side of his face and neck and digging painfully into his wrists and ankles to keep him still and it’s like he’s got ten people running clever, greedy hands over every surface of his body. But they’re all Loki, and Loki’s not touching his cock, only just deigning to let Tony rut against him minutely with every vicious slap, and Tony needs it, needs more, is getting relief and satisfaction by tiny, desperate increments. Is begging so hard he can’t hear his own words. Begging Loki not to stop.

Tony can hear Loki talking too but he can’t make out words at all, just hears the texture of that voice brushing through him, low and rough and masterful. That voice owns him. The hand slapping him hard every other second owns him, and so does the thigh he need to thrust up against just a little harder, but that voice owns him through and through, and come to think of it Tony is pretty sure that that’s exactly what the voice is saying.

“ _I own you_ ,” he can suddenly hear clearly now that he understands, and there are possessive hands on every inch of him, and he’s still begging, so it must be true, he’d do anything for Loki right now.

Just  _please Loki more_.

“Look at me, Tony.”

Tony didn’t even notice closing his eyes but he opens them and Loki’s looking right back, still bathed in warm light, intent and beautiful and vicious. But he has mercy, this time, in this moment, because the god shifts his weight onto his knees, lifts up just enough that Tony has room to move, and there’s not a hand pinning him down anymore, and Tony thrusts up, fast and unsteady.  _Finally_.

The hand that’s been slapping him slides gently into place this time, coming to rest against the abused flesh of his ass and then it  _grips hard_ , and Tony comes.

He has no breath at this moment but he makes the shape of a scream with how the pleasure slams into him, tries hard to expel a lungful of air that isn’t there as his release rips through his body.

He finally manages to get a breath, painful for how fast he gulps the air down. But so much lingering pleasure scatters through his body with every breath that he really doesn’t care.

He’s floating back down to a place where he can remember which way down  _is_ , and he realizes the hands are gone, all but two, the two that are carding through his hair stroking softly along the top of his scalp.

“How do you feel?” Loki asks, entirely smug for all he’s still breathless with arousal himself.

Tony breaks into a soundless laugh for how inadequate any answer he can think of would be.

He feels spectacular, deliciously warm and relaxed like there’s hot fudge running sluggishly through his bloodstream. He feels helpless. He feels awfully fucked out for someone who hasn’t even been fucked. He feels…

He feels dizzy.


	29. Threesome/Group Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepper's here! A sequel of sorts to Day 27.

Tony isn’t sure this is a good idea.

He’s watching his previous girlfriend and his current boyfriend make out on his bed. Pepper’s hands are running up and down Loki’s back over the cloth of a thin black tee shirt, and Loki is leaning over her, engaging her in a deep, enthusiastic kiss. Tony’s just standing mutely next to the bed staring, pretty sure that his brain has turned off, because all he can seem to do is watch.

Tony’s positive that this is a  _great_  idea. But he’s not so convinced that it’s a good one.

He was pretty shell-shocked when Pepper said yes to his required-by-contract-with-Loki offer of a threesome with him and his new boyfriend. He was pleased, confused, and more than a little scared.

That’s how he felt when she said yes. Now he’s feeling… really that exact same set of emotions, just to the distinctly greater degree.

There’s a faint rustle of starched fabric as Loki starts unbuttoning Pepper’s blouse, and there’s the slightly higher whisper of cotton dragging under denim as she starts pulling at his undershirt there it was tucked into his jeans.

Now Tony can see her running her hands over Loki’s naked back, two layers of cloth bunching and redraping higher and higher over the lines of Loki’s spin, the muscles that weave into his ribs, a glimpse of prominent shoulder blade…

Tony should join in already.

He should stay where he is.

He should consider the emotional consequences of jumping into the middle of his two most complicated romantic relationships — one of which ended for very good reasons — and throwing sex into the mix.

He’s not sure he can move. This is like porn but sexier and so much more bewildering. Which is impressive, considering porn.

Loki is kissing his way down Pepper’s neck. His clever mouth finds her nipple through her bra and Pepper starts making noises that go straight to Tony’s cock, which is burning a little with discomfort now with how it’s pressing awkwardly against the inside of his jeans, and no, seriously, he needs to get in on this.

Emotional consequences? What are those?

Tony moves quickly once he’s managed to break his awe-induced paralysis, unzipping his pants and unbuttoning his shirt before crawling onto the bed and making his way over to the two unbearably hot people currently doing unbearably hot things on his bed. Loki’s hands are running down Pepper’s sides and hips and legs now, and there’s just an overabundance of clothes everywhere, but Tony’s pretty sure he can help out with that part.

He starts with the easiest point logistically, kneeling up behind Loki where he’s still bent over Pepper, and reaching around the god’s waist to work his jeans open blindly, then working both pants and underwear down as far as he can to pool around his knees, revealing two slim, strong thighs and a perfect ass, and Tony can’t resist running a hand over it appreciatively, the dips and points of bone where it transitions into torso. His hand brushes Pepper’s hand incidentally where they’re both appreciating the same long cord of muscle just left of Loki’s vertebrae and Loki makes a growling noise that’s a mixture of  _turned on_  and  _betrayed_ , like he thinks the two ex-lovers are ganging up on him on purpose.

Then Pepper jerks and whimpers sharply, and Tony’s willing to bet Loki just bit her somewhere very sensitive in retaliation.

That’s kind of not fair, Tony thinks, but he doesn’t get as far as figuring out whether it’s not fair that Pepper’s getting punished for something Tony did, or not fair that Pepper’s the one who still has the undivided attention of Loki’s mouth.

Pepper pushes Loki aside a bit to reach up past him to grab Tony by one side, fisting one hand in his pant leg and the other in his shirt tail and  _yanking_  down, hard and unexpected so that after a moment of twisting and vertigo, he’s landed on his back right next to her, wind knocked right out of him.

“Whoa,” Tony huffs as Pepper works her way out from under Loki, still intently gripping Tony’s pant leg. “Wait, Pep, did you agree to this because you’ve still got aggression to work out on me about the way things ended between us? Because this doesn’t seem like a very healthy way to…” He trails off as Pepper settles into a position straddling his hips. “You know what, actually I think that would be fine.”

He can hear Loki laugh next to him, a low, sexy vibration that gets closer as the god scooches up against his side, until Tony can feel that laughter in the shell of his ear. “Nonsense. As I explained the other day, Pepper is only going to show me a little of what she’s learned, having been your lover for a longer time than I.”

Somehow, Tony doesn’t find that very reassuring, but he nods anyway. He can smell Pepper’s hair and perfume, the way they smell when she’s worked up a sweat, and that scent has a lot of very intimate memories attached to it. Her shirt is all unbuttoned down the front, and her hair is disheveled from Loki’s hands, but still ironed straight enough to fall low on her chest, copper strands bright against the white lace of her bra.

He glances sideways and finds Loki finally pulling off his shirts, an amorphous tangle of cloth and elbows and stray locks of hair, before Loki’s pale face appears again and he tosses both the tee and the undershirt behind him off the bed. The god turns his eyes to the woman sitting on Tony’s lap and raises his eyebrows invitingly. “Where would you like to start?”

Pepper grins and brushes aside Tony’s shirt to place a single finger on Tony’s chest, lateral to his nipple, where the bite marks she used to leave on that particular spot are long since healed.

Long since, but not for much longer.

The next couple hours will go down in Tony’s memory as some of the best and most terrifyingly intense of his life, in which he makes by far the greatest concentration of embarrassing noises. Pepper leads Loki in mapping every inch of him, stopping every so often to discuss with almost clinical specificity  _just how_  to lick at that particular rib, how long to tease the first nipple Loki plays with versus the second one, where to ghost his teeth over lightly, wet sharp edges along sensitive skin, and where to bite hard so Tony is gasping and writhing and making complaining noises contradicted by the encouraging, half-articulate words he manages to get out.

Loki follows her every instruction, deferential in a way he never is to Tony, and just bringing in the subtlest flairs of creativity to the tasks she sets him to.

These two are going to drive him insane

And that’s before Pepper finishes undressing and crawls around to sit on Tony’s face, all the while still offering Loki instructions on the subtleties of working his way down Tony’s legs with his fingers and mouth while he drags the inventor’s pants off by inches.

Very happy with this development, happy to have something to really  _do_ for the first time tonight, Tony takes hold of Pepper’s upper thighs where they meet the curve of her backside — (he’s really missed this particular backside, even if he hasn’t dwelt on it much since Loki arrived in his life) — takes hold of her and shifts her around a bit to get exactly the angle he wants before he presses his mouth to her folds and starts licking very lightly, leaving himself plenty of leeway to work his way up to something harder and deeper.

He hears Pepper’s voice break encouragingly as he works and as she keeps talking, hears little hitches in her breath and hears her pause for a few seconds when his tongue finds a perfect angle and pressure.

It’s been a long time, a long time since he’s been with someone of the female sex, let alone Pepper, and it does take him a little while to warm up and remember  _exactly_  what she likes, and she helps him along, breaks off her monologue to Loki for a quick, breathless, “Yes, Tony,  _there_ , there and lower. Good. Now move to the side and use your teeth just a —  _ahh_.” There’s a pause and then Tony hears Pepper address Loki again. “Sometimes he likes to be ordered around a bit.”

“He’s not the only one,” Loki comments, and Tony is surprised to notice that the god’s voice is shot, like he can barely get the words out past the effect of following Pepper’s instructions for all this time.

But Tony’s too busy to enjoying his current task to analyze that too much right now. He’s  _missed_  this. He’s missed the smell of her and the taste of her and the particular way her voice breaks on his name sometimes when he does this really well — and this whole venture was either a very bad idea or a very, very good one.

When he finally comes down Loki’s throat, Pepper’s voice is still offering instructions and advice that has Tony shivering with hyper-aware anticipation of every move Loki’s mouth makes on his dick right before it happens.

Once Pepper decides that she’s finished with Tony’s mouth — and that Tony is finished with Loki’s mouth — she slides down and completes the circle by giving Loki a blowjob, and Tony just gets to come down slowly from his own high and watch Pepper finish taking Loki apart. He’s too blissed out to be jealous now, and the the sight of it is  _gorgeous_.

Then they’re all just lying on the bed recovering their breath and inwardly marveling at how fantastic that was.

“While I can’t speak for Tony,” Loki says eventually, “so far as I am concerned, the invitation to our bed remains open from here on out.”

“You can speak for me!” Tony insists, and his voice is slurred with happy exhaustion, prompting both his bedfellows to laugh at him. “You can so speak for me. You speak good. Words. Pepper. Sex. Yes.”

Pepper laughs a little harder, then rolls to face Loki. “Well, you still have to teach me everything  _you’ve_  learned,” she points out.

Tony’s eyes widen. “I’m so screwed,” he breathes, but he doesn’t succeed at actually sounding upset about it.

He still isn’t sure this is a good idea.

But he’s more convinced than ever that it’s a  _great_  one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think that's actually my personal favorite of the fills I did for this challenge.


	30. Voyeurism

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Nonconsensual voyeurism.

Tony shouldn’t be seeing this.

The face in front of him is pale and beautiful and a bit drawn, a young adult in the last couple years of his teens (Tony’s age), with perfect black hair that’s tousled with sleep, and a loose night shirt of a similar color, with an overlarge, cutoff neckline that’s falling haphazardly toward the edge of two bony shoulders.

Tony tries to make himself close the cabinet door in front of him, look away, but he just ca —

—  _won’t_. Damnit, if he’s gonna be  _that guy_ , he’s at least gonna be honest with himself about it.

So, Tony’s parents have connections at this school, and those connections have managed to swing him a room in the  _only_  wing of the dorms where he gets his own bathroom. Spiffy, right? As he’s just learned, his mirror is actually a glass door to a medicine cabinet, made of two-way glass, so he can see his hand right through it when he opens the little door.

And of course the rooms are designed to mirror each other, so his bathroom is next to another bathroom with a perfectly lined-up layout.

All good so far, except the school clearly didn’t do a good job checking over this room in between one occupancy and the next one.

And whoever lived here last pulled out the back of the medicine cabinet.

The back of the medicine _cabinets_  plural, so there’s nothing between the two two-way mirrors making up the cabinet doors, and, well…

That’s why Tony is standing in a dark bathroom staring at the very attractive face of the guy who lives next door.

 _Loki_ , Tony is pretty sure is the guy’s name, Tony remembers meeting him yesterday when they were both moving in, and he remembers already having plans to tap that ass even before he found out how edible Loki looks when he’s drowsy and fresh out of bed.

Loki is brushing his teeth.

 _Since when is watching a guy brush his teeth a thing that is hot_? Seriously, this is upsetting. Tony has never had this kink before, had never been this turned on by another guy’s _face_  before. He’s an abs guy, an ass guy, a dick guy, he wants to see the  _body_ , not the person.

Apparently this person is the exception.

Damnit, those eyes…

Loki finishes brushing his teeth and bends down to rinse his mouth. Tony makes another attempt to get ahold of his self-control, fails completely, and leans forward so he can see a bit better to watch the process.

Loki is finished rinsing his mouth and on to splashing cold water over his face.

Then he’s up and unknowingly facing Tony again, wiping his own face dry with a towel and scanning his reflection for stray drops of water.

Tony can see a stray drop of water. Tony can see a stray drop of water finding a trail down Loki’s chin and along the cords and dips of Loki’s neck. Tony can see that drop of water slow as it reaches the jut of Loki’s clavicle. Tony can see that drop of water finally falling down over the bone and disappearing under the loose line of Loki’s shirt, to fall along who-knows-what muscles and grooves beyond.

Oh god, Tony needs to lick that drop of water, and also every inch of skin it just touched.

Tony so has a boner right now.

He should really stop this before things get any worse. For crying out loud, he can always just walk around, knock on the door and proposition the guy. It’s not like he’s shy about that sort of thing.

But what if Loki says no?

Normally he can handle rejection, but  _this is Loki_.

(Tony _thinks_  that’s his name. He only met the guy yesterday.)

Loki sniffs his own armpit, makes a face, and tugs his shirt off in one abrupt movement, turning in the direction of the shower as he tosses the garment on the floor.

Tony leans forward again, looking up and down the slim, whipcord musculature of Loki’s torso. And, yup, Tony is still very much an abs guy. That has not changed.

Tony finally gives in to the urge to reach down into his sweatpants and stroke a little relief into the erection that’s plaguing him. It’s not a good idea, he should  _close the cabinet_ , but at least it  _feels_  like a good idea, and that’s a good enough reason as far as his dick is concerned.

Now Loki is pushing his boxers down over his hips, revealing a wealth more of black hair and cock that Tony is absolutely drooling to lick.

Tony catches himself leaning in enough to be in danger of hitting his head against Loki’s cabinet door and abruptly pulls back. His hand is working faster and faster over his own groin, and he’s having trouble keeping his breathing quiet.

Loki walks out of sight and Tony finally steps aside too, away from the temptation to crane his neck for a better view. He leans back against the wall they share, stroking himself furiously as the images of what he just saw play over and over in his mind.

God-dammit, that  _water droplet_. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

He hears the sound of the shower start up in the next bathroom.

He realized there is about to be water running all over that gorgeous body, and that’s it, he loses it, shaking and coming all over his hand with a rough noise that’s fortunately probably covered up by the sound of running water next door.

Well, shit. He’s  _that guy_.

Shaking his head at his own newly achieved moral low, Tony walks back to the cabinet to close the door. He just gonna  _ask the guy out_  next time. Seriously. No mure skulking behind mirrors. Tony takes hold of the glass door to close it.

And leans in one last time to see if he can catch a glimpse of Loki in the shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's the end. Thanks for reading! If you like my stuff, please check out my other works here on AO3. I can also be found [here](http://roseapprentice.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
